Art of Darkness

This text aims to describe the principles governing Gothic literature. Ranging across five centuries of fiction, drama and verse - including tales as diverse as Horace Walpole's "The Castle of Otranto", Shelley's "Frankenstein", Coleridge's "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" and Freud's "The Mysteries of Enlightenment", Anne Williams proposes three new premises: that Gothic is poetic, not novelistic, in nature; that there are two parallel Gothic traditions - Male and Female; and that the Gothic and the Romantic represent a single literary tradition. Building on the psychoanalytic and feminist theory of Julia Kristeva, Williams argues that Gothic conventions, such as the haunted castle and the family curse, signify the fall of the patriarchal family; Gothic is therefore "poetic" in Kristeva's sense because it reveals those "others" most often identified with the female. Williams identifies distinct Male and Female Gothic traditions. In the Male plot, the protagonist faces a cruel, violent and supernatural world, without hope of salvation. The Female plot, by contrast, asserts the power of the mind to comprehend a world which, though mysterious, is ultimately sensible. By showing how Coleridge and Keats used both Male and Female Gothic, Williams challenges accepted notions about gender and authorship among the Romantics.

ISBN 0226899071   Pages 328 ISBN13 9780226899077 (What's this?)   Volumes 1 Publisher The University of Chicago Press   Weight (grammes) 425 Imprint University of Chicago Press   Published in Chicago, IL Format Paperback   Height (mm) 228 Publication date 13 Jul 1995   Width (mm) 152 Library of Congress PR448.G6W5   Spine width (mm) 16 DEWEY 820.9   Academic level Undergraduate, Postgraduate, Professional / Scholarly DEWEY edition DC20

		Acknowledgments
		Introduction: Gothic Fiction's Family Romances
Pt. 1		Riding Nightmares; or, What's Novel about Gothic?
1		The Nightmare of History: Acting On and Acting Out		27
2		The House of Bluebeard: Gothic Engineering		38
3		Pope as Gothic "Novelist": Eloisa to Abelard		49
4		Symbolization and Its Discontents		66
5		The Nature of Gothic		80
6		Family Plots		87
Pt. 2		Reading Nightmeres; or, The Two Gothic Traditions
7		Nightmere's Milk: The Male and Female Formulas		99
8		Male Gothic: Si(g)ns of the Fathers		108
9		Demon Lovers: The Monk		115
10		Why Are Vampires Afraid of Garlic?: Dracula		121
11		The Female Plot of Gothic Fiction		135
12		The Male as "Other"		141
13		The Fiction of Feminine Desires: Not the Mirror but the Lamp		149
14		The Eighteenth-Century Psyche: The Mysteries of Udolpho		159
Pt. 3		Writing in Gothic; or, Changing the Subject
15		Dispelling the Name of the Father		175
16		An "I" for an Eye: The Rime of the Ancient Mariner		182
17		"Frost at Midnight": (M)others and Other Strangers		200
18		Keats and the Names of the Mother		208
		Epilogue: The Mysteries of Enlightenment; or, Dr. Freud's Gothic Novel
		Appendix A: Inner and Outer Spaces: The Alien Trilogy
		More...

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