Also by Glennis Byron. LETITIA LANDON: The Woman behind LEL. DRACULA: The New Casebook (editor) DRACULA (editor) NINETEENTH-CENTURY STORIES BY WOMEN

Transcription

1 SPECTRAL READINGS

2 Also by Glennis Byron LETITIA LANDON: The Woman behind LEL DRACULA: The New Casebook (editor) DRACULA (editor) NINETEENTH-CENTURY STORIES BY WOMEN REIMAGINING WOMEN: Representations of Women in Culture (editor with Shirley Neuman) Also by David Punter THE LITERATURE OF TERROR: A History of Gothic Fictions from 1760 to the Present Day ROMANTICISM AND IDEOLOGY (with David Aers and Jon Cook) BLAKE, HEGEL AND DIALECTIC THE HIDDEN SCRIPT: Writing and the Unconscious THE ROMANTIC UNCONSCIOUS: A Study in Narcissism and Patriarchy GOTHIC PATHOLOGIES: The Text, the Body and the Law INTRODUCTION TO CONTEMPORARY CULTURAL STUDIES (editor) WILLIAM BLAKE: Selected Poetry and Prose (editor) WILLIAM BLAKE: The New Casebook (editor)

3 Spectral Readings Towards a Gothic Geography Edited by Glennis Byron and David Punter

4 First published in Great Britain 1999 by MACMILLAN PRESS LTD Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and London Companies and representatives throughout the world A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN ISBN (ebook) DOI / First published in the United States of America 1999 by ST. MARTIN S PRESS, INC., Scholarly and Reference Division, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y ISBN Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Spectral readings : towards a Gothic geography / edited by Glennis Byron and David Punter. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN (cloth) 1. Gothic revival (Literature) 2. Fiction History and criticism. 3. Horror tales History and criticism. 4. Gothic revival (Literature) Great Britain. 5. English fiction History and criticism. 6. Gothic revival United States. 7. American fiction History and criticism. 8. Women and literature. I. Byron, Glennis, II. Punter, David. PN3435.S '8729 dc CIP Selection and editorial matter Glennis Byron and David Punter 1999 Introduction David Punter 1999 Text Macmillan Press Ltd 1999 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1P 9HE. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources

5 Contents List of figures Notes on contributors vii viii Introduction: of apparitions 1 David Punter Part I Theory: regions of the Gothic 1 The Gothic production of the unconscious 11 Fred Botting 2 Ceremonial Gothic 37 David Punter 3 The nurture of the Gothic, or, how can a text be both popular and subversive? 54 William Veeder Part II Heartlands: the British nineteenth century 4 Lost cities: London s apocalypse 73 Alexandra Warwick 5 Hell is a city: symbolic systems and epistemological scepticism in The City of Dreadful Night 88 David Seed 6 A pestilence which walketh in darkness : diagnosing the Victorian vampire 108 Robert Mighall Part III America: states of instability 7 American Gothic landscapes: the New World to Vietnam 127 Jeannette Idiart and Jennifer Schulz 8 Gothic numbers in the new republic: The Federalist No. 10 and its spectral factions 140 Helen F. Thompson v

6 vi Contents 09 Spectres of abjection: the queer subject of James s The Jolly Corner 161 Eric Savoy Part IV Europe: dimensions of the body 10 The Gothic and the Otherings of ascendant culture: the original Phantom of the Opera 177 Jerrold E. Hogle 11 Heiner Müller s Medea: towards a paradigm for the contemporary Gothic anatomy 202 Barnard Turner Part V Contemporary (re)versions 12 Deaths in Venice: Daphne du Maurier s Don t Look Now 219 Avril Horner and Sue Zlosnik 13 Dr McGrath s disease: radical pathology in Patrick McGrath s neo-gothicism 233 Christine Ferguson Index 245

7 List of figures Figure 6.1 First published in The Secret Companion, a Medical Work on Onanism or Self Pollution (London: Brodie & Co., 1845) 118 Figure 10.1 First published in Coombs Popular Phrenology, 1865, reproduced in Lawrence W. Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988) 187 vii

8 Notes on contributors Fred Botting lectures in literary theory, romanticism and Gothic writing at the University of Lancaster. His publications include Making Monstrous (Manchester University Press, 1991), Gothic (Routledge, 1996), and the New Casebook on Frankenstein (Macmillan, 1995). Glennis Byron is Senior Lecturer in English Studies at the University of Stirling. Her publications include Letitia Landon: The Woman Behind L.E.L. (Manchester University Press, 1995), an edition of Dracula (Broadview, 1998), and the New Casebook on Dracula (Macmillan, 1999). Christine Ferguson is currently a doctoral student in English at Tulane University in New Orleans. She has published on Victorian Freak Shows and the Modern Primitivist movement, and has recently completed an MA thesis on the literature of Jack the Ripper at the University of British Columbia. Jerrold E. Hogle is Professor of English, University Distinguished Professor, and Chair of the Faculty at the University of Arizona. His books include Shelley s Process (Oxford University Press) and Evaluating Shelley (Edinburgh University Press), and he has served recently as President of the International Gothic Association. He has published many studies of the Gothic and is currently completing a thorough study of The Phantom of the Opera as a cultural phenomenon. Avril Horner is Senior Lecturer in English and Associate Director of the European Studies Research Institute at the University of Salford. Her publications include Landscapes of Desire: Metaphors in Modern Women s Fiction (with Sue Zlosnik; Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1990), and she is co-author, with Sue Zlosnik, of Daphne du Maurier: Writing, Identity and the Gothic Imagination (Macmillan, 1998). Jeannette Idiart and Jennifer Schulz are at the University of Washington in Seattle, where they are working on topics in early twentieth-century American literature, including moral reform writing; the literature of the Civil War; and the Harlem Renaissance. viii

9 Notes on contributors ix Robert Mighall was recently a Research Fellow in English at Merton College, Oxford, and is now a commissioning editor for a major London publisher. He has written articles on various aspects of nineteenthcentury literature and history, and has edited a volume of Oscar Wilde s poems. His historicist study of Victorian Gothic fiction is forthcoming with Oxford University Press. David Punter is Professor of English at the University of Stirling. His publications include The Literature of Terror (Longman, 1980; new twovolume edition, 1996); The Hidden Script (Routledge, 1985); The Romantic Unconscious (Harvester, 1989); and Gothic Pathologies (Macmillan, 1998). Eric Savoy is Professor of American Literature at the University of Calgary. His recent published work has been on Hawthorne and melancholia; on Henry James and queer theory; and on AIDS and poststructuralism. He is co-editor of American Gothic: New Interventions in a National Narrative (University of Iowa Press, forthcoming). David Seed is Reader in English Studies at the University of Liverpool. He has published monographs on Thomas Pynchon, Joseph Heller, Rudolph Wurlitzer and James Joyce. He is general editor of the Science Fiction Texts and Studies series (Liverpool University Press). Helen F. Thompson has recently completed her dissertation, on Edmund Burke, Frances Burney and the bourgeois public sphere, at Duke University. She has been appointed Assistant Professor at Arizona State University. Barnard Turner teaches modern literature at the National University of Singapore. He has published a monograph on Thoreau, and other work on German and Australian writing. He is currently completing a book on the dramatist Heiner Müller. William Veeder has lectured and published essays and books on various Anglo-American Gothic writers including Mary and Percy Shelley, Irving, Poe, Hawthorne, Le Fanu, Stevenson, Bierce, Gilman, James, Hardy and Stoker. He is presently working on The Turn of the Screw and an historical novel on Bierce. Alexandra Warwick is Lecturer in English at the University of Westminster. She has published on vampires and the Empire; on

10 x Notes on contributors nineteenth-century painting; and on aspects of women s studies. Fashioning the Frame: Dress, the Body and Boundaries was published in 1997, and Terminal Conditions, on the apocalypse in the nineteenth century, appeared in Sue Zlosnik is Head of English at Liverpool Hope University College. She has published Landscapes of Desire: Metaphors in Modern Women s Fiction (with Avril Horner, Harvester, 1990), and Daphne du Maurier: Writing, Identity and the Gothic Imagination (with Avril Horner, Macmillan, 1998).