Portraiture And British Gothic Fiction

Examples from British writers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries show how portraits became a new mode of identity for the middle class. Traditionally, kings and rulers were featured on stamps and money, the titled and affluent commissioned busts and portraits, and criminals and missing persons appeared on wanted posters. British writers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, however, reworked ideas about portraiture to promote the value and agendas of the ordinary middle classes. According to Kamilla Elliott, our current practices of “picture identification” (driver’s licenses, passports, and so on) are rooted in these late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century debates. Portraiture and British Gothic Fiction examines ways writers such as Horace Walpole, Ann Radcliffe, Mary Shelley, and C. R. Maturin as well as artists, historians, politicians, and periodical authors dealt with changes in how social identities were understood and valued in British culture—specifically, who was represented by portraits and how they were represented as they vied for social power. Elliott investigates multiple aspects of picture identification: its politics, epistemologies, semiotics, and aesthetics, and the desires and phobias that it produces. Her extensive research not only covers Gothic literature’s best-known and most studied texts but also engages with more than 100 Gothic works in total, expanding knowledge of first-wave Gothic fiction as well as opening new windows into familiar work.

Traditionally, kings and rulers were featured on stamps and money,the titled and affluent commissioned busts and portraits, and criminals and missing persons appeared on wanted posters. British writers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, however, reworked ideas about portraiture to promote the value and agendas of the ordinary middle classes. According to Kamilla Elliott, our current practices of "picture identification" (driver's licenses, passports, and so on) are rooted in these late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century debates. Portraiture and British Gothic Fiction examines ways writers such as Horace Walpole, Ann Radcliffe, Mary Shelley, and C. R. Maturin as well as artists, historians, politicians, and periodical authors dealt with changes in how social identities were understood and valued in British culture—specifically, who was represented by portraits and how they were represented as they vied for social power. Elliott investigates multiple aspects of picture identification: its politics, epistemologies, semiotics, and aesthetics, and the desires and phobias that it produces. Her extensive research not only covers Gothic literature's best-known and most studied texts but also engages with more than 100 Gothic works in total, expanding knowledge of first-wave Gothic fiction as well as opening new windows into familiar work. -- Jerrold E. Hogle, University of Arizona

The Gothic began as a designation for barbarian tribes, was associated with the cathedrals of the High Middle Ages, was used to describe a marginalized literature in the late eighteenth century, and continues today in a variety of forms (literature, film, graphic novel, video games, and other narrative and artistic forms). Unlike other recent books in the field that focus on certain aspects of the Gothic, this work directs researchers to seminal and significant resources on all of its aspects. Annotations will help researchers determine what materials best suit their needs. A Research Guide to Gothic Literature in English covers Gothic cultural artifacts such as literature, film, graphic novels, and videogames. This authoritative guide equips researchers with valuable recent information about noteworthy resources that they can use to study the Gothic effectively and thoroughly.

The Gothic is a contested and complicated phenomenon, extending over many centuries and across all the arts. In The Edinburgh Companion to the Gothic and the Arts, the range of essays run from medieval architecture and design to contemporary gaming and internet fiction; from classical painting to the modern novel; from ballet and dance to contemporary Goth music. The contributors include many of the best-known critics of the Gothic (e.g., Hogle, Punter, Spooner, Bruhm) as well as newer names such as Kirk and Round. The editor has put all these contributors in touch with each other in the preparation of their essays in order to ensure the maximum benefit to the reader by producing a well-integrated book which will prove much more than a collection of disparate essays, but rather a distinctive contribution to a field.

Painting the Novel: Pictorial Discourse in Eighteenth-Century English Fiction focuses on the interrelationship between eighteenth-century theories of the novel and the art of painting – a subject which has not yet been undertaken in a book-length study. This volume argues that throughout the century novelists from Daniel Defoe to Ann Radcliffe referred to the visual arts, recalling specific names or artworks, but also artistic styles and conventions, in an attempt to define the generic constitution of their fictions. In this, the novelists took part in the discussion of the sister arts, not only by pointing to the affinities between them but also, more importantly, by recognising their potential to inform one another; in other words, they expressed a conviction that the theory of a new genre can be successfully rendered through meta-pictorial analogies. By tracing the uses of painting in eighteenth-century novelistic discourse, this book sheds new light on the history of the so-called "rise of the novel".

Visuality in the Novels of Austen, Radcliffe, Edgeworth and Burney argues that the proliferation of visual codes, metaphors and references to the gaze in women’s novels published in Britain between 1778 and 1815 is more significant than scholars have previously acknowledged. The book’s innovative survey of the oeuvres of four culturally representative women novelists of the period spanning the Anglo-French War and the Battle of Waterloo reveals the importance of visuality – the continuum linking visual and verbal communication. It provided women novelists with a methodology capable of circumventing the cultural strictures on female expression in a way that concealed resistance within the limits of language. In contexts dominated by ‘frustrated utterance’, penetrating gazes and the perpetual threat of misinterpretation, Jane Austen, Ann Radcliffe, Maria Edgeworth and Frances Burney used references to the visible and the invisible to comment on emotions, socio-economic conditions and patriarchal abuses. Visuality in the Novels of Austen, Radcliffe, Edgeworth and Burney offers new insights into verbal economy and the gender politics of the era by reassessing expression and perception from a uniquely telling point of view.

A macabre story of a man who keeps his daughter-in-law married to his son by force. Hugh Walpole(1884 – 1941) was known for his weird stories and rather theatrical style of writing.

Essay from the year 2012 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 1,0, University of Stuttgart, language: English, abstract: Edgar Allan Poe is one of the most famous and celebrated American writers whose short stories inspired numerous other authors. The Oval Portrait, initially titled Life in Death, is a revised and shorter version that was published in the Broadway Journal in 1845. Although being one of his shortest stories, Poe is able to establish in The Oval Portrait a haunting atmosphere of terror. The fate of the beautiful, young woman fascinates the narrator who is entirely taken by the enigmatic painting and the inscrutable circumstances of the lady's death. It is in this way that the author is able to create simultaneously a sense of both mystery and tragedy, and this essay will examine in greater detail how these two elements are combined in order to make up the Gothic mood typical for Poe's writings. Firstly, I will have a look at the author and his background before providing some general information about this short story. In this case, a biographical approach to The Oval Portrait is very enriching and is able to shed light on some aspects, as we will see later on. Secondly, I will concentrate on the appearance of the mysterious atmosphere in the work, such as the narrator's equivocal reliability, the mansion and its relation to the Gothic, the role of light and darkness, and the open questions. My third point of analysis will be the tragic: how is Poe able to make both the story's narrator and his readers be captivated by such a sad woman's death within less than four pages? To begin with, I will focus on the painter and his obsession with his art, as well as the dilemma whether the latter is inevitably irreconcilable with life. Then the woman's outward appearance, that is her surpassing loveliness, will be linked to what Poe himself says about the role of beauty and horror in his work Philosophy of Composition. Furthermore, James Twitchell's interpretation of The Oval Portrait will be taken into account.

John Berger, one of the world's most celebrated storytellers and writers on art, tells a personal history of art from the prehistoric paintings of the Chauvet caves to 21st century conceptual artists. Berger presents entirely new ways of thinking about artists both canonized and obscure, from Rembrandt to Henry Moore, Jackson Pollock to Picasso. Throughout, Berger maintains the essential connection between politics, art and the wider study of culture. The result is an illuminating walk through many centuries of visual culture, from one of the contemporary world's most incisive critical voices.

Gothic Britain is the first collection of essays to consider how the Gothic responds to, and is informed by, the British regional experience. Acknowledging how the so-called United Kingdom has historically been divided on nationalistic lines, the twelve original essays in this volume interrogate the interplay of ideas and generic innovations generated in the spaces between the nominal kingdom and its component nations and, innovatively, within those national spaces. Concentrating upon fictions depicting England, Scotland and Wales specifically, Gothic Britain comprehends the generic possibilities of the urban and the rural, of the historical and the contemporary, of the metropolis and the rural settlement – as well as exploring uniquely the fluid space that is the act of travel itself. Reading the textuality of some two hundred years of national and regional identity, Gothic Britain interrogates how the genre has depicted and questioned the natural and built environments of the island of Britain.