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The Folk Horror and Crime Fiction Hybrid in 'Heart of Darkness'
Full text linkThis article explores hybridization and generic experiments within the crossovers and intersections between crime fiction and folk horror in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Published in 1899, this novella is a beautiful, grimly bleak look at colonialism. Chinua Achebe identifies Heart of Darkness racism and scathingly calls it “‘permanent’ literature,” which is, he explains, “read and taught and constantly evaluated by serious academics” (15). This article applies genre fiction to this revered canonical novella, retrospectively identifying it as a folk horror text. Heart of Darkness has been categorized as a crime/detective narrative before (see Brooks 238–63), but I will argue that examining Heart of Darkness as a hybrid of crime fiction and folk horror allows us to look askance at a text that has engendered so much scholarship and criticism. Mapping the narrative trajectory through, in particular, a folk horror lens, can deepen our understanding of the nuances and contradictions present in the text
Gothic Animals: Uncanny Otherness and the Animal With-Out
Full text linkGothic Animals provides a fresh and original approach to the subject of animals in literature and other media. Beginning with the premise that the presence of non-human creatures causes an always-already uncanny rift in human assumptions about reality, this volume explores the dark side of animal nature and the ‘otherness’ of animals as viewed by humans. Using cutting edge theory on non-human animals, the post-human, eco-criticism, literary and cultural theory, Gothic Animals takes the scholarship of a much-discussed genre into new territory. Following Darwin’s theories of evolution, nineteenth-century fiction quickly picked up on the idea of the ‘animal within’ with texts like R.L. Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray and H.G. Wells’s The Island of Doctor Moreau. In these novels the fear explored was of an unruly, defiant, degenerate and entirely amoral animality lying (mostly) dormant within all of us. This was our animal-other associated with the id: passions, appetites and capable of a complete disregard for all taboos and any restraint. As Cyndy Hendershot states, this ‘animal within’ ‘threatened to usurp masculine rationality and return man to a state of irrational chaos’ (The Animal Within, p. 97). This however, relates the animal to the human in a very specific, anthropocentric way. Non-humans and humans have other sorts of encounters too, and even before Darwin humans have often had an uneasy relationship with animals. Rats, horses, dogs, cats, birds, insects and other beasts have, as Donna Haraway puts it, a way of ‘looking back’ at us (When Species Meet, p. 19). Animals of all sorts have an entirely different and separate life to humans and in fiction this often morphs into Gothic horror. In these cases it is not about the ‘animal within’ but rather the animal ‘with-out’: Other and entirely incomprehensible. The proposed collection will conflate animal studies, Gothic studies and new theories on the post-human in a new and original way. There is no other extended study that looks at animals and the Gothic.
The collection will provide a new take on questions about humanity, the Gothic and the non-human; questions that have perhaps only recently been created by animal studies. In this way it anticipates a gap in the study of both the Gothic and animals. Both are growing areas of scholarly debate and this new volume should be appealing to academics, students and interested sections of the general public
Folk Horror New Global Pathways
No full textSINCE AT LEAST 2010, critics have been working to define folk horror, understand its appeal, and establish its key texts, including the films that have become the central triumvirate of the folk horror canon – Witchfinder
General (Michael Reeves, 1968), The Blood on Satan’s Claw (Piers Haggard, 1971) and The Wicker Man (Robin Hardy, 1973). While the 1960s and 1970s witnessed what has been called the ‘first-wave’ of folk horror – in film, fiction and television – critics have also begun to uncover a rich prehistory, looking back to the late nineteenth and early twentieth century and finding a different canonical triad in the fiction of Algernon Blackwood, Arthur Machen and M. R. James. At the same time, directors and novelists
in the twenty-first century have been re-inventing the genre: both creators and critics are, then, collectively enlarging and enriching what ‘folk horror’ means. Folk Horror: New Global Pathways explores and expands the canons
that have been built around folk horror, reaching for a greater historical and global inclusivity. After all, folk horror derives from folklore – from the roots of community and communal fears. And as such, one would assume that it has to be global, composed of variegated regional formations
Ghosts and the Gothic
No full textGhosts have long been connected with the Gothic, but until now there has not been a book dedicated to the subject. This collection examines ghostly presences (and absences) in both classic and lesser-known Gothic texts from the beginning of the genre to the present in a global context. Arguing that the undead, in the form of ghosts, are intrinsic to the Gothic mode, essays in the collection question the place of manifested spirits. The Gothic has always been 'political', and essays in this collection examine some of the most relevant issues facing us today: from the destruction of the natural environment, to questions of 'freedom', to gender politics
Women Writing Men: 1689-1869
No full textAs men have written women so women have always written men. Debate about how men have represented women in literature has a long and distinguished history; however there has been much less examination of the ways in which women writers depict male characters. This is clearly a notable absence given the recent rise in interest in the field of 18th and 19th century masculinities. This book explores how women writers create and question men and masculinity. Women writers were in a unique position to be able to deconstruct and examine cultural norms from a position away from the centre. This enabled women to ‘look aslant’ at masculinity using their female gaze to expose the ruptures and cracks inherent within the rigid formation of the manly ideal. This collection focuses on women’s representations of men and masculinity as they negotiate issues of class, gender, race, and sexuality
The Victorian Male Body
No full textThe Victorian Male Body examines some of the main expressions and practices of Victorian masculinity and its embodied physicality. The white, and frequently middle class, male body was often normalised as the epitome of Victorian values. Whilst there has been a long and fruitful discussion around the concept of the ‘too-visible’ body of the colonised subject and the expectations placed on women’s bodies, the idealised male body has received less attention in scholarly discussions. Through its examination of a broad range of Victorian literary and cultural texts, this new collection opens up a previously neglected field of study with a scrutinising focus on what is arguably the ideologically most important body in Victorian society
Catherine Crowe: Gender, Genre, and Radical Politics
No full textThis is the first full-length study of the popular Victorian writer Catherine Crowe (1790–1872). Crowe is increasingly being recognised as an important and influential figure in the literary and Spiritualist circles of the nineteenth century. This monograph offers a reassessment of her major works, arguing that her writing was prescient. Best known today for her collection of “real” ghost tales The Night Side of Nature: Or Ghosts and Ghost Seers, Crowe also wrote five popular novels, as well as numerous short stories and essays. Innovative and sometimes original in their use of genre, her works covered the Newgate genre, helped to
initiate detective fiction, included elements of the social problem novels of the 1840s, and pointed the way to the Sensation novels of the 1860s.
Politically radical in many ways, Crowe was vocal about women’s oppression by men, social inequality, poverty, slavery, and animal rights.
This volume aims to restore an author who was once famous and lauded to her proper place in the scholarly discussion of Victorian literature
Curses, Rites and Questionable Offerings
Full text linkA major aim of this chapter is to provide an overview of the presence of folk horror iconography, settings, themes and structures in videogames. Given that games present us with a modality of interaction absent from other media, it is also important to give some sense of how the formal characteristics of game media shape the articulation of folk horror in game contexts. While there are elements of folk horror in board games, such as those based on the Lovecraft mythos or those parented by comics or other media, such as the Lock and Key board game, I will focus instead on videogames across a range of game genres; mainly those that fall into the category of Adventure or Horror ‘role-playing games’, both single player games and multiplayer games
‘Encircled by Minute, Evilly-Intentioned Airplanes’: The Uncanny Biopolitics of Robotic Bees
No full textCatherine Crowe, 'The Story of Lilly Dawson' Critical Edition
No full textThis new critical edition of Catherine Crowe's 1848 novel 'The Story of Lilly Dawson' includes an introduction by Ruth Heholt, notes and appendices
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