The Gothic Condition

Terror, History and the Psyche

David Punter

• Publisher: University of Wales Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781783168231
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Gothic, Romance, & Horror Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This book brings together fourteen of the most ambitious and thought-provoking recent essays by David Punter, who has been writing on the Gothic to academic and general acclaim for over thirty years. Punter addresses developments in Gothic writing and Gothic criticism since the mid-eighteenth century, by isolating and discussing specific themes and scenarios that have remained relevant to literary and philosophical discussion over the decades and centuries, and also by paying close attention to the motifs, figures and recurrences that loom so large in twenty-first-century engagements with the Gothic. This book, while engaging deeply with Gothic history, constantly addresses our continuing immediate encounters with Gothic tropes – the vampire, the zombie, the phantom, the living dead.

Notes

1: Spectrality: The Ghosting of Theory

¹Maurice Blanchot, The Space of Literature, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln, NE, 1982), p. 194.

²Reproduced in Andrew Bennett and Nicholas Royle, An Introduction to Literature, Criticism and Theory (4th edn, Harlow, 2009), p. 160.

³See, e.g., various essays in Scott Brewster, John J. Joughin, David Owen and Richard J. Walker (eds), Inhuman Reflections: Thinking the Limits of the Human (Manchester, 2000). The cover illustration, perhaps unsurprisingly, is of Max Schreck as Dracula.

⁴See my Gothic Pathologies: The Text, the Body and the Law (London, 1998), e.g., pp. 14–15.

⁵Hamlet, I.v.77.

⁶See Chris Baldick and Robert Mighall, ‘Gothic Criticism’, in David Punter (ed.), A New Companion to the Gothic (Oxford, 2012), pp. 267–87.

⁷Punter, Gothic Pathologies, p. 14

⁸Peter Buse and Andrew Stott (eds), Ghosts: Deconstruction, Psychoanalysis, History (Basingstoke, 1999), p. 6.

⁹See Samuel Weber, The Legend of Freud (Minneapolis, 1982).

¹⁰Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York, 1994), p. 4.

¹¹Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents (1930), in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey et al. (24 vols, London, 1953–74), XXI, p. 70.

¹²See Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, The Wolf Man’s Magic Word: A Cryptonymy, trans. Nicholas Rand (Minneapolis, 1986), e.g., p. 83.

¹³Nicholas Abraham and Maria Torok, The Shell and the Kernel: Renewals of Psychoanalysis, ed. Nicholas Rand (Chicago, 1994), p. 130.

¹⁴Abraham and Torok, The Shell and the Kernel, p. 173.

¹⁵The mention of ventriloquism can hardly fail to remind of one of the foundational Gothic texts, Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland (1798).

¹⁶See Julia Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves, trans. Leon Roudiez (New York, 1991).

¹⁷Jean Laplanche, Essays on Otherness, ed. John Fletcher (London, 1999), pp. 170–1.

¹⁸Philippa Berry and Andrew Wernick (eds), Shadow of Spirit: Postmodernism and Religion (London, 1992), pp. 2–4.

¹⁹See Christopher Bollas, The Shadow of the Object: Psychoanalysis of the Unthought Known (London, 1987).

²⁰See my Postcolonial Imaginings: Fictions of a New World Order (Edinburgh, 2000), pp. 61ff.

²¹See Michael Taussig, Shamanism, Colonialism and the Wild Man: A Study in Terror and Healing (Chicago, 1987).

²²Nicholas Royle, After Derrida (Manchester, 1995), p. 146.

²³See Sigmund Freud, ‘The “Uncanny”’ (1919), in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey et al. (24 vols, London, 1953–74), XVII, p. 221.

²⁴See Toni Morrison, Beloved (1987) and Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things (1997).

²⁵See Robert J. C. Young, ‘Deconstruction and the Postcolonial’, in Nicholas Royle (ed.), Deconstructions: A User’s Guide (Basingstoke, 2000), pp. 204–5.

²⁶T. S. Eliot, Little Gidding, in Collected Poems, 1909–1962 (London, 1963), p. 217.

²⁷See Homi Bhabha, ‘Of Mimicry and Man’, in The Location of Culture (London, 1994), pp. 85–92.

²⁸See Jean Baudrillard, e.g., Revenge of the Crystal: Selected Writings on the Modern Object and its Destiny, 1968–1983, ed. Paul Foss and Julian Pefanis (London, 1990).

²⁹Robert Smith, ‘Deconstruction and Film’, in Royle, Deconstructions, p. 121.

³⁰Cf. Bret Easton Ellis, Glamorama (1998).

³¹William Gibson, Neuromancer (London, 1984), p. 180.

2: Francis Lathom in the Eighteenth Century

¹See Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey, introd. Claudia L. Johnson (London, 1992), p. 40; Jane Austen’s Letters, ed. Deirdre Le Faye (new edn, Oxford and New York, 1995), p. 15.

²Devendra P. Varma, ‘I...