Biologically impossible, morally offensive and aesthetically dichotomous, vampires epitomise transgression. They are life and death; repulsion and magnetic attraction in one.
Readings
Horror from the Soul: Gothic Style in Allan Poe’s Horror Fictions
There is no other passion than fear that can effectively deprive people from actions and thoughts. In Poe’s works, we have profound comprehension that all the terrifying souls were fully immersed in the atmosphere of the Gothic horror Poe had depicted for them.
Gothic Infections: Storytelling as Therapy in Dark Narratives
Much like the modern pathography (Frank: 2013; Hunsaker Hawkins: 1993), one goal of the Gothic is to provide a voice for those who have been silenced, by either societal, familial, physical or mental causes.
‘Vampirella’ Radio Plays as a ‘Sleeping Beauty’ Metaphor
Angela Carter’s radio play ‘Vampirella’ (1976) opens with a chorus of birdsong, with doves cooing and a lark singing in the musical accompaniment of the title character’s long and sharp nails against the bars of a birdcage. The melancholic vampire asks herself, “Can a bird sing only the song it knows or can it learn a new song…”, only to be interrupted by the screech of a bat.
Hawthorne’s Romantic Chronotope of the Gothic Home
Nathaniel Hawthorne states in the preface to ‘The House of the Seven Gables’ that he hopes “the book may be read strictly as a Romance, having a great deal more to do with the clouds overhead, than with any portion of the actual soil of the County of Essex” (Hawthorne 3).
Introduction to the Supernatural Victorian Gothic Literature
According to Janles Hogg’s ‘Romantic Reassessment of the Gothic Novel’ (1986), there are three essential components of the Gothic aesthetic: horror, suspense and shock (Hogg 4).
Development of the Gothic Heroine from Innocence to Experience
Janice Radway asserts that ― each romance is, in fact, a mythic account of how women must achieve fulfilment in a patriarchal society where fulfilment is engendered by transformation, metamorphosis.
Heroines Relationships in the Eighteenth-Century Gothic Fiction
The Gothic novel was a peculiar and typically feminine genre of the second half of the eighteenth-century. Peculiar in many respects since Horace Walpole claimed his story — ‘The Castle of Otranto’, the very first specimen of a long-lasting tradition — to be a blend of the ancient romance and the modern novel, the sentimental and the realistic tradition.
Tales of Terror from the House of Blackwood
Although any horror story might be designated a ‘Tale of Terror,’ this term has come to have a particular association with the short sharp shockers of Regency and early-Victorian monthly magazines — particularly Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine — a form most perfectly realised in the work of Edgar Allan Poe.
The Aspects of Gothic in Nineteenth-Century Scandinavian Literature
It is easy to agree with Tzvetan Todorov that fantastic fiction creates a certain “hesitation” in the minds of the intrafictional characters and the extrafictional readers. But it is not as evident that Todorov is right when he claims that what distinguishes the uncanny or gothic from the fantastic is whether the supernatural is explained or not (Todorov 1995:25).
