Search results
, who uses other male figures as proxy sexual threats to force compliance. In The Italian Radcliffe explicitly unites incestuous sexual desire and murderous desire, deploying the uncle as a figure conflicted over whether to rape or kill his niece, whom he has already left without property or title. When the common threads of legality and sexuality that are apparent within these different Gothic narratives by
Like a malevolent virus, Gothic narratives have escaped the confines of literature and spread across disciplinary boundaries to infect all kinds of media … Gothic texts deal with a variety of themes just as pertinent to contemporary culture as to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries
-Catholic element of the story focuses not so much on the abuses of the Church but on a kind of institutional corruption that is seen to plague even the highest realms of the nation. 3 In fact, much of the narrative appears to function as a veiled political commentary, lamenting the weakness of a monarch who has allowed himself to be governed completely by an evil minion and urging the return to ‘a wise and virtuous rule’ rooted in England's long history of liberty. 4 The restitution of such a rule and the king's regained sovereignty by the novel's conclusion indicates Leland
entirely in Ireland, with the main activity of the tale occurring in fifteenth-century Munster and Ulster. Melville's preface explains that its subject matter – the White Knight himself – was a real person: ‘ There were formerly three branches of the family of Fitzgerald, distinguished in Ireland by the titles of the White Knight, the Knight of Kerry, and the Knight of Glynn. The first, which I have chosen as the subject of the following pages, is now extinct ’. 1 The narrative that follows clearly aligns itself with a Radcliffean tradition of gothic romance in
praised, the reviewer summarises the narrative as morally ‘unexceptionable’. The difference between the responses to these Gothic works lies in the type of incestuous relationship depicted. Parsons’s novel depicts the growing romantic love of an uncle, Mr Weimar, for his niece, Matilda, who recounts: ‘“[my uncle] was for ever seeking opportunities to caress me, his language was expressive of the utmost
detail and imaginative fictional narrative. The tale recounts the various escapades of the eponymous John of Gaunt (1340–99), the younger brother of Edward, the Black Prince, as he accompanies his sovereign brother, first to Wales, and then to Scotland, where they become embroiled in a war between that nation and England over the ransom of the imprisoned King of Scotland, David II. Describing the battle in which the English triumph over the Scottish as well as the hasty war council that precedes it, White inserts a footnote containing a barbed observation on the
removing the maternal from the narrative until the heroine can reclaim her mother as she simultaneously locates her own sexuality. The Gothic as written by authors such as Beckford, Lewis and Horace Walpole responds to the mother by relocating her as the sexual centre of the text as victim or perpetrator, making the chaste maternal monstrous through mother–son incest. Representing mothers as capable of
A.C. McClurg & Co., was promoted as ‘an attractive new edition of a tale that once charmed our grandmothers to tears’. Despite the narrative's ‘quaintness’, the edition was seen to ‘well [repay] a reading’. 75 And, in April 1893, The Daily Inter Ocean advertised the sale of ‘the Gems of the literature of the world’, listing the names of authors whose works might be had for a very attractive 25 cents. Keeping Roche company in this catalogue of well-known and widely read authors is a diverse selection of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British, Irish
Freudian theory that claims girls develop incestuous desires for the fathers who raise them is not applicable to the many Gothic novels in which girls are not raised by their fathers. Its application can thus lead to misreadings that diminish the importance of incest to the narrative and position heroines as victims of fantasies rather than threats. For incest to be a result of children desiring the
the possibility of a public resolution to sectarian violence in the private understanding reached between Pansfield and Elvina, ‘Conjugal fidelity’ counters Temple's ‘imagology of horror’ with a plot that both complicates Protestant narratives of victimhood and imagines an alternative future to continued religious factionalism. 14 Griffith's story thus runs afoul of the virulent anti-Catholicism traditionally associated with the ‘Irish Gothic’, offering instead a message of toleration influenced by patriot politics of the 1770