An illustration from Charles Dickens' Bleak House of Tom All Alones, the urban slum credited as a major influence on the development of the genre
Early Gothic fiction tended to use the city as a starting point and then move to rural locations, abandoning the settings and securities of urban civilization for wild and dangerous rural regions. In the mid-nineteenth century, Gothic novels began either to reverse this process or to be conducted entirely in the modern industrial city, which itself became a zone of liminality, danger, and adventure, coming to be referred to in the late twentieth century as urban Gothic.[2]Robert Mighall sees the urban Gothic as a genre arising in London in the mid-nineteenth century out of the critique of the impact of industrialization, leading to the discourse on urban reform that can be seen in City Mystery genre, including The Mysteries of Paris (1842–43) and G. W. M. Reynolds' Mysteries of London (1844–8) as well as Charles Dickens' Oliver Twist (1837–8) and Bleak House (1854).[3] These pointed to the juxtaposition of wealthy, ordered, and affluent civilization against the disorder and barbarity of the poor within the same metropolis. Bleak House in particular is credited with seeing the introduction of urban fog in the novel, which would become a frequent characteristic of urban Gothic literature and film.[4]
The urban Gothic genre that developed in the Victorian fin de siècle, beginning with Robert Louis Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), applied the foggy aesthetic and the Gothic trope of doubling to the city.[4] They often incorporated ideas about the influence of modern science on life, and the mixture of science and the supernatural in urban Gothic novels has led Katherine Spencer to describe them as "a mediating form between science fiction and fantasy."[5]Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde explores traditional debates about the nature of good and evil through motifs from folklore while incorporating a modern, scientific explanation.[6]Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) similarly revisits the concept of a Faustian Pact in a modern social context.[7]Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897) presents the eastern fringes of Europe in Transylvania as a point of origin for the arrival in modern provincial and then metropolitan London society of a creature from folklore.[8]
In the early twentieth century, the urban Gothic was extended to other cities, like Paris, such as in Gaston Leroux's The Phantom of the Opera (1909–10).[2] From the twentieth century urban Gothic helped to spawn other sub-genres, including Southern Gothic, using the Southern United States as a location,[9] and later Suburban Gothic, which shifted the focus from the urban centre to the residential periphery of modern society.[10] Since the 1980s Gothic horror fiction and urban Gothic in particular has revived as a genre, with series of novels like Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles and Poppy Z. Brite's Lost Souls[11] both making New Orleans a key centre of Gothic fantasy.[12] Urban Gothic themes and images were also used in comics and graphic novels, including Frank Miller's Daredevil (from 1979), Batman (from 1986), the Sin City series (from 1991), James O'Barr's The Crow, Alan Moore's From Hell (from 1991) and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (1999).[13] Urban Gothic aesthetics and themes are also explored in video games by presenting the city as a threat, often as its own character, as in Silent Hill (1999).[14]
Twenty-First Century
In more recent scholarships, critics have identified certain works as New Urban Gothic.[15] These novels possess the qualities of the urban gothic novel while moving the setting to include more diverse urban spaces.[15] For example, Gina Wisker identifies Sandi Tan's The Black Isle (2012) as an example of an urban gothic set in Singapore.[16] In the novel, Singapore exists as a Gothic city haunted by the ghosts of war and colonialism.[16] The film Suzhou River (2000) also uses Gothic elements to depict the city of Shanghai.[17] Urban gothic elements from the Victorian era carry over to twenty-first century dystopian novels, such as The City and the City by China Miéville.[18]
Urban Gothic novels were among the earliest and most influential works adapted for the cinema, helping to form the genre of horror film. These included Nosferatu (1922), The Phantom of the Opera (1925), Dracula (1931), and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1941).[19] After World War II, emphasis shifted to films that more often drew inspiration from the insecurities of life, utilizing new technology and dividing into the three sub-genres of horror-of-personality, the horror-of-Armageddon and the horror-of-the-demonic.[20] However, during the late 1950s and early 1960s, the British company Hammer Film Productions enjoyed huge international success from Technicolor films involving classic Gothic horror characters, often starring Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee, particularly Dracula (1958), which resulted in many sequels into the 1970s.[11] The 1983 vampire film The Hunger provides a highly influential modernized and urbanized version of Gothic culture.[11] The same themes have been revisited periodically in films like Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992).[21]Seven (1995) is another example of a movie dealing with dark themes in an urban landscape.[1] A comparable film from this century is The Batman (2022), which shares similar gritty elements with Seven (1995).[22]
Notes
1 2 S. Macek, Urban Nightmares: the Media, the Right, and the Moral Panic Over the City (University of Minnesota Press, 2006), pp. 240–1.
1 2 R. Mighall, "Gothic Cities", in C. Spooner and E. McEvoy, eds, The Routledge Companion to Gothic (Routledge, 2007), pp. 54–72.
↑ R. Mighall, A Geography of Victorian Gothic Fiction: Mapping History's Nightmares (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).
1 2 R. Mighall, "Gothic Cities", in C. Spooner and E. McEvoy, eds, The Routledge Companion to Gothic (Routledge, 2007), pp. 56–7.
↑ K. Spencer. "Victorian urban Gothic: the first fantastic literature", in G. E. Slusser and E. S. Rabkin, eds, Intersections: Fantasy and Science Fiction (SIU Press, 1987), p. 91.
↑ B. M. Stableford, Space, Time, and Infinity: Essays on Fantastic Literature (Wildside Press LLC, 1998), p. 174.
↑ James B. Twitchell, The Living Dead: a Study of the Vampire in Romantic Literature (Duke University Press, 1987), p. 171.
↑ S. Arata, Fictions of Loss in the Victorian Fin de Siècle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 111.
↑ A. L. Smith, American Gothic Fiction: an Introduction (Continuum, 2004), pp. 121–3.
↑ B. Murphy, The Suburban Gothic in American Popular Culture (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).
1 2 3 J. G. Melton, The Vampire Book: the Encyclopedia of the Undead (Visible Ink Press, 1994), pp. 298–303.
↑ G. Hoppenstand and R. B. Browne, eds, The Gothic World of Anne Rice (Popular Press, 1996).
↑ A. W. Smith, "Gothic and the Graphic Novel", in C. Spooner and E. McEvoy, eds, The Routledge Companion to Gothic (Routledge, 2007), pp. 251–9.
↑ Millette, Holly-Gale; Heholt, Ruth, eds. (2020). The new urban gothic: global gothic in the age of the anthropocene. Palgrave gothic. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN978-3-030-43777-0.
1 2 Millette, Holly-Gale; Heholt, Ruth, eds. (2020). The new urban gothic: global gothic in the age of the anthropocene. Palgrave gothic. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN978-3-030-43777-0.
1 2 Wisker, G. (2020). Urban Gothic: Singapore. In: Millette, HG., Heholt, R. (eds) The New Urban Gothic. Palgrave Gothic. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham.
↑ Lopez, A. (2020). Suzhou River: ‘On the [Haunted] Waterfront’. In: Millette, HG., Heholt, R. (eds) The New Urban Gothic. Palgrave Gothic. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham.
Abraham "Bram" Stoker was an Irish author who is best known for writing the 1897 Gothic horror novel Dracula. During his lifetime, he was better known as the personal assistant of actor Sir Henry Irving and business manager of the West End's Lyceum Theatre, which Irving owned.
Dracula is a novel by Bram Stoker, published in 1897. An epistolary novel, the narrative is related through letters, diary entries, and newspaper articles. It has no single protagonist and opens with solicitor Jonathan Harker taking a business trip to stay at the castle of a Transylvanian nobleman, Count Dracula. Harker escapes the castle after discovering that Dracula is a vampire, and the Count moves to England and plagues the seaside town of Whitby. A small group, led by Abraham Van Helsing, investigate, hunt and kill Dracula.
Gothic fiction, sometimes called Gothic horror, is a loose literary aesthetic of fear and haunting. The name refers to Gothic architecture of the European Middle Ages, which was characteristic of the settings of early Gothic novels.
Horror is a genre of fiction that is intended to disturb, frighten or scare. Horror is often divided into the sub-genres of psychological horror and supernatural horror, which are in the realm of speculative fiction. Literary historian J. A. Cuddon, in 1984, defined the horror story as "a piece of fiction in prose of variable length... which shocks, or even frightens the reader, or perhaps induces a feeling of repulsion or loathing". Horror intends to create an eerie and frightening atmosphere for the reader. Often the central menace of a work of horror fiction can be interpreted as a metaphor for larger fears of a society.
The undead are beings in mythology, legend, or fiction that are deceased but behave as if alive. Most commonly the term refers to corporeal forms of formerly alive humans, such as mummies, vampires, and zombies, which have been reanimated by supernatural means, technology, or disease. In some cases, the term also includes incorporeal forms of the dead, such as ghosts.
The Anno Dracula series by Kim Newman—named after Anno Dracula, the series' first novel—is a work of fantasy depicting an alternate history in which the heroes of Bram Stoker's novel Dracula fail to stop Count Dracula's conquest of Britain, resulting in a world where vampires are common and increasingly dominant in society. While Dracula is a central figure in the events of the series, he is a minor character in the books and usually appears in only a few climactic pages of each book. While many of the characters from Newman's Diogenes Club stories appear in the Anno Dracula novels, they are not the same as the ones in those stories, nor is the Diogenes Club itself the same.
Largely as a result of the success of Bram Stoker's Dracula, Transylvania has become a popular setting for gothic horror fiction, and most particularly vampire fiction. In some later books and movies Stoker's Count Dracula was conflated with the historical Vlad III Dracula, known as Vlad the Impaler (1431–1476), who though most likely born in the Transylvanian city of Sighișoara, ruled over neighboring Wallachia.
Wilhelmina "Mina" Harker is a fictional character and the main female character in Bram Stoker's 1897 Gothic horror novel Dracula.
The Jewel of Seven Stars is a horror novel by Irish writer Bram Stoker, first published by Heinemann in 1903. The story is a first-person narrative of a young man pulled into an archaeologist's plot to revive Queen Tera, an ancient Egyptian mummy. It explores common fin de siècle themes such as imperialism, the rise of the New Woman and feminism, and societal progress.
Erotic horror, alternately called horror erotica or dark erotica, is a term applied to works of fiction in which sensual or sexual imagery are blended with horrific overtones or story elements for the sake of sexual titillation. Horror fiction of this type is most common in literature and film. Erotic horror films are a cornerstone of Spanish and French horror.
The Dracula Society is a London-based literature and travel group with an interest in supernatural and macabre works of fiction, as exemplified by Bram Stoker's Dracula.
The character of Count Dracula from the 1897 novel Dracula by Bram Stoker, has remained popular over the years, and many forms of media have adopted the character in various forms. In their book Dracula in Visual Media, authors John Edgar Browning and Caroline Joan S. Picart declared that no other horror character or vampire has been emulated more times than Count Dracula. Most variations of Dracula across film, comics, television and documentaries predominantly explore the character of Dracula as he was first portrayed in film, with only a few adapting Stoker's original narrative more closely. These including borrowing the look of Count Dracula in both the Universal's series of Dracula and Hammer's series of Dracula, including include the characters clothing, mannerisms, physical features hair style and his motivations such as wanting to be in a home away from Europe.
William Hughes FRHistS FSA Scot is Professor of Literature in English at the University of Macau, China: he has specialised in the study of Bram Stoker. He was educated at the Liverpool Collegiate School and the University of East Anglia, and also holds a PGCE from Christ Church, Canterbury. He has presented radio programmes for the BBC World Service and BBC Radio 4, and has also appeared on live television through Living TV's Most Haunted Live!, most recently during the 2009 broadcast from St George's Hall, Liverpool. In 2015, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and, in 2019, a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland. Prior to accepting a chair at the University of Macau he was, for 26 years, a member of the English faculty at Bath Spa University, England, where he led teaching and research in the fields of Gothic Literature and the medical humanities.
Monster literature is a genre of literature that combines good and evil and intends to evoke a sensation of horror and terror in its readers by presenting the evil side in the form of a monster.
Carol A. Senf is professor and associate chair in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication at the Georgia Institute of Technology. With four books, two critical editions, one edited essay collection, and various critical essays, she is a recognized expert on the biography and works of Irish author Bram Stoker. She received the Lord Ruthven Award in 1999.
John Edgar Browning is an American author, editor, and scholar known for his nonfiction works about the horror genre, Dracula, and vampires in film, literature, and culture. Previously a visiting lecturer at the Georgia Institute of Technology, he is now a professor of liberal arts at the Savannah College of Art and Design in Atlanta, Georgia.
Robert Eighteen-Bisang was a Canadian author and scholar who was one of the world's foremost authorities on vampire literature and mythology.
A Gothic film is a film that is based on Gothic fiction or contains Gothic elements. Since various definite film genres—including science fiction, film noir, thriller, and comedy—have used Gothic elements, the Gothic film is challenging to define clearly as a genre. Gothic elements have also infused the horror film genre, contributing supernatural and nightmarish elements. To create a Gothic atmosphere, filmmakers have sought to create new camera tricks that challenge audiences' perceptions. Gothic films also reflected contemporary issues. A New Companion to The Gothic's Heidi Kaye said "strong visuals, a focus on sexuality and an emphasis on audience response" characterize Gothic films like they did the literary works. The Encyclopedia of the Gothic said the foundation of Gothic film was the combination of Gothic literature, stage melodrama, and German expressionism.
Roger Luckhurst is a British writer and academic and since 2020 the Geoffrey Tillotson Chair of Nineteenth Century Studies at Birkbeck College. He was appointed professor in modern and contemporary literature in the Department of English, Theatre, and Creative Writing at Birkbeck, University of London in 2008 and was distinguished visiting professor at Columbia University in 2016. He works on Victorian literature, contemporary literature, Gothic and weird fiction, trauma studies, and speculative/science fiction. Luckhurst is notable for his introductions and editorships to the Oxford World's Classics series volumes -- Late Victorian Gothic Tales,Dracula, Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, The Portrait of a Lady, H.P. Lovecraft's Classic Horror Tales, King Solomon’s Mines, and The Time Machine -- and for his books on J. G. Ballard (1997), The Invention of Telepathy (2002), Science Fiction (2005) The Trauma Question (2008), The Mummy’s Curse: The True Story of a Dark Fantasy, and Zombies: A Cultural History. He has also written two books for the British Film Institute classic film series on The Shining and Alien.
The Blood of the Vampire is a Gothic novel by Florence Marryat, published in 1897. The protagonist, Harriet Brandt, is a mixed-race psychic vampire who kills unintentionally. The novel follows Harriet after she leaves a Jamaican convent for Europe, and her ill-fated attempts to integrate with Victorian society.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
