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Robert Miles, "Introduction to
Gothic Technologies"
The traditional view of the Gothic romance
was that it was a belated, eighteenth-century form that was
quickly overtaken by the more progressive, "realist" novel,
and by Romantic poetics. The Gothic romance sought to
incite the experience of "ideal presence" in the passive
reader, as if the reader's mind were a camera obscura onto
which the writer's vision was projected. As such the Gothic
romance was more 'mirror', than 'lamp'. Miles uses the work
of Jerrold Hogle, Terry Castle and Jonathan Crary to
overturn this picture. Hogle argued that the Gothic Romance
dramatized the post-modern condition of simulation, of
ghostly 'counterfeits' or hollowed-out signs; Castle
pointed out how the experience of simulation was quickly
troped as a phantasmagoria (originally a magic-lantern
ghost show); while Crary argued that modern patterns of
consumption and spectatorship begin with the
early-nineteenth century privileging of the sovereign
observer. Miles argues that the Gothic romance was resisted
because of its perceived modernity as a form of technology
that privileged the reader as a sovereign consumer of
primarily visual matter.
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Fred Botting, "Reading
Machines"
Gothic fictions deploy an array of
machines, generic engines and formulaic contrivances to
arouse mechanical reactions in an era in which
industrialisation begins to define the modern world. The
mechanical effects noted by Walpole in his Gothic story
define criticism of the genre and encompass various forms
and media like photography, automata and cinema. For
Benjamin modernity itself becomes phantasmagorical. The
modern cultural history of the machine metaphor thus
discloses not only the uncanny aspect of technological
innovation but a strangeness at the core of formations of
human subjectivity.
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Diane Long Hoeveler, "Smoke
and Mirrors: Internalizing the Magic Lantern Show in
Villette"
With considerable historical background in
mind, I would like to examine a number of the stock gothic
tropes, including the mysterious nun, the paintings of
women, the theater scene, and the fête in
Villette as examples of not simply one of last
gasps of high Victorian gothicism, but also of the
internalization and critique of gothic theatrical
technology. As Castle observes, the "phantasmagoria
should [have] become a kind of master trope in
nineteenth-century romantic writing," and certainly she
applies the representation in provocative ways to the
symbols and imagery in Thomas Carlyle's French
Revolution. In a similar fashion, I would like
to read Brontë's novel as a transmutation of the
phantasmagoria to the novel form, a translation of a
theatrical topos into the novelistic universe. Doing so
allows us to see both the cultural persistence and
permeability of gothic conventions, at the same time it
enables us to appreciate that Brontë must have been
assuming a shared theatrical knowledge in her reading
audience. Critics have persistently faulted the novel
for its "unreliable narrator" (Knies) and its "odd
structure" (Martin); however, an understanding of how
Brontë uses and critiques the theatrical machinery of
her era actually works to clarify both the purpose and the
structure of the novel. It has become conventional to
describe the central conflict in the novel as one between
"Reason" and "Imagination" in the personality of Lucy
Snowe, the narrator. But a materialist interpretation
of the work finds a much larger issue at stake.
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Sophie Thomas, "Making
Visible: The Diorama, the Double, and the (Gothic)
Subject"
This essay begins with the advent of the
London Diorama in the 1820s, and examines the
nature—and the technological basis—of its
visual appeal. The question of illusionism is explored,
largely through an examination of the periodical reviews,
such as Lady Morgan's, with their subtle emphasis on
questions of memory, personal history and place—in
short, on private subjectivity—in the face of
fragmentation, dislocation, and distraction which were
obvious features of the popular, mass viewing experience.
Central to the discussion however is the prominence of
scenes of ruin at the Diorama, in the popular subjects of
gothic churches and picturesque landscapes. Death,
doubling, and repetition—indeed a number of uncanny
themes and effects—are found to be a function of the
visual technology of the Diorama, as well as a central
feature of those gothic subjects upon which that technology
"appears" to depend.
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Dale Townshend, "Gothic
Visions, Romantic Acoustics"
This essay approaches the relationship
between the Gothic and the rise of high Romantic aesthetics
by means of a distinction between sight and sound, vision
and hearing. Proceeding through a rereading of
Wordsworth and Coleridge's respective condemnations of
Gothic romance, the essay argues that early versions of the
Romantic aesthetic sought to stake out its differences from
the perceived cultural taint of the Gothic by effecting a
crucial shift from the eye to the ear, substituting for the
florid visuality of Gothic romance the cadences, metres and
rhymes of the Romantic poetic acoustic. While the
visuality of the Gothic rendered it hardly distinguishable
from the camera obscura and other populist modes of
entertainment of its day, the Romantic response sought to
privilege the subject's perception of sound over vision by
installing the figures of the nightingale and Aeolian harp
at the centre of its poetic alternative. Illustrating
this consistent privileging of sound over sight in a range
of poetic contexts, the essay turns to consider the case of
Ann Radcliffe's own acoustic revision in The
Italian of the visual excesses of Matthew Gregory
Lewis's The Monk, maintaining that if Radcliffe
did indeed enjoy the approval of the Romantic literati,
this was partly the result of her similar offering up of
sound as a positive alternative to the perceived dangers of
sight and heightened
visibility.
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Angela Wright, "Haunted
Britain in the 1790s"
This article argues that the rise in
popularity of the Gothic romance in the 1790s led to an
obsession with its pernicious effects in the periodical
press. In particular, reviewers focused upon the imitative
tropes that were used exhaustively in Gothic novels during
the 1790s. Examining critical essays such as the 1797
"Terrorist Novel Writing" alongside specific reviews of
individual novels, Wright examines how the critical
concerns of the periodical press often centered around the
Gothic's passive use of visual tropes. This concern with
visuality and spectacle was rapidly linked to the Gothic
romance's political and generic connections with France.
British critics argued that British literature had been
contaminated by a continental tendency towards luxury and
artifice in fiction. Wright proceeds to argue that the
vocabulary of criticism during the 1790s in its turn became
contaminated with the Gothic's reliance on visual and
imitative cues. After examining the fatigued state of
Gothic criticism towards the end of the 1790s, Wright
concludes by demonstrating how Wordsworth's Preface to
Lyrical Ballads offered an innovative and original
critical departure.
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