Zusammenfassung der Ressource
Gothic Critics
- John McCrae
- "The villain of the piece has to be fairly upper class"
- The Gothic was "appealing to
everyone who enjoyed a vicarious
thrill" not just to women
- "Ambiguities of reality are everywhere"
- Dracula is "almost
automatically cinematic"
- "Wolves are deep in the psychology of Europe"
- Gothic texts are "written by outsiders"
- Dracula is the "personification
of the undead"
- Nick Groom
- "The Gothic blurs the boundaries of the victim and perpetrator"
- "Art is a way to keep the dead among
us"
- "Dorian becomes a vampire himself, feeding on sin"
- The central question within the Gothic is "who, or what, am I?"
- "There is a blurring between
one's self and the other"
- "The past is inescapable, and indissolubly linked to the present"
- Dracula is "a novel that questions what it is to be human"
- Female vampire "embodies a fear of
non-heterosexual reproduction and the rejection
of men"
- The vampire "combines
fears and fantasies of
consumption"
- Stoker "inverts the Eucharist"
- Fred Botting
- Gothic novels "adopt a cautionary
stategy, warning of dangers of social and
moral transgression in their darkest and
most threatening form"
- "Gothic signifies a writing of excess"
- "Gothic landscapes are desolate, alienating and full of menace"
- "The Castle gradually gave way to the old house: as both
building and family line, it became the site where fear
and anxieties returned in the present"
- "In Gothic productions imagination and emotional effects
exceed reason"
- "Passion, excitement and sensation transgress social
proprieties and moral laws"
- "Exciting rather than informing, it chilled their blood,
delighted their superstitious fancies"
- "Gothic fictions seemed to promote vice and violence, giving free reign to selfish
ambitions and sexual desires"
- Clive Bloom
- 'The Gothic speaks to the dark side of domestic fiction'
- Robert Kidd
- David Rogers
- "Narratives constructed upon a clash between
polar forces such as those of Good and Evil are
as old as narrative itself"
- Stoker is "pitting Dracula against a group of
un-ambiguously 'manly' men whose
qualities, actions and outlook seem to
contrast him in virtually every way"
- The men "in being accepted for what they are not, they
become ironically aligned with their enemy"
- Elaine Showalter
- Fin de Siecle: "all the laws that governed sexual
identity and behaviour seemed to be breaking
down"
- Gail Cunningham
- The New Woman as: "a nervous
type, often anorexic, a
neurasthenic woman, prone to
hysteria"
- The New Woman as: "a highly sexual
creature, whose permissiveness
undermined social stability"
- John Bowen
- "The genre of Gothic is a particularly strange and
perverse family of texts"
- The strange place a protagonist finds themselves: "It is often
threatening or violent, sometimes sexually enticing, often a
prison"
- "everything that characters and readers think that they’ve
safely left behind comes back with a vengeance"
- "Ghosts, like gothics, disrupt our
sense of what is present and what is
past, what is ancient and what is
modern"