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Defining the Gothic: from Tolkien to Todorovian Ambiguity

March 13, 2019

academia, ambiguity, criticism, fantasy, Gothic, Todorov, Tolkien

Quite often in this blog, I refer to ambiguity as a fundamental aspect of Gothic literature. Another thing I must’ve mentioned is that defining the Gothic is no easy task, and each scholar seems to have a unique idea on how to approach the matter.

Personally, I like to focus on the aspect of ambiguity and in-betweenness. In this, I draw from Tzvetan Todorov’s definition of the fantastic, as I will explain below.

Examining the differences between the ways Todorov and J.R.R. Tolkien define the fantastic is a fruitful task, as it allows us to pinpoint the ontology of the various expressions of the fantastic. Furthermore, it provides a great theoretical framework for researching more general aspects of otherness.

defining the gothic — Defining the Gothic is no easy task.

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Theorizing Time in the Victorian Era

November 7, 2018

Criticism

academia, criticism, time, Victorian

Note: the following article on time in the Victorian era is a modified excerpt (pp. 29-35) from my doctoral dissertation, “Time is Everything with Him”: The Concept of the Eternal Now in Nineteenth-Century Gothic, which can be downloaded (for free) from the repository of the Tampere University Press. For a list of my other academic publications, see here.

Theorizing Time in the Victorian Era: Changing the Scientific Paradigm

Theorizing Time in the Victorian era changed due to a series of scientific breakthroughs. Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology, written in the early 1830s, as well as Charles Darwin’s 1859 On the Origin of Species, forced a reevaluation of history, suggesting the past had to be reconsidered.

In addition, the mid-century discovery of the second law of thermodynamics added further anxiety in relation to history and the future.

It was interpreted to imply the extinction of human life due to the exhaustion of usable energy – the so-called heat death of the universe. Suddenly, the existing definition, meaning, and destination of human existence seemed to be lacking. A dark, unfathomable past lay on the one side, while a rather ominous and equally uncertain future lay on the other.

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Religion in Dracula: Christian, Pagan, and Jewish Narratives

September 19, 2018

Criticism

academia, criticism, Dracula, Gothic, literature, religion

Note: the following article on religion in Dracula is a modified excerpt (pp. 115-117) from my doctoral dissertation, “Time is Everything with Him”: The Concept of the Eternal Now in Nineteenth-Century Gothic, which can be downloaded (for free) from the repository of the Tampere University Press. For a list of my other academic publications, see the relevant page on the main site.

You can also find an article about religion in Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein

Religion in Dracula is a matter of oppositions. Bram Stoker’s Dracula presents the narrative as a whole and the Count in particular as an opposition to Christianity. Jacques Coulardeau argues that “Dracula [is] the heir of an older tradition than Christianity, that is to say paganism … Older religions are centered on a cult to nature: the night and the day, as well as the earth, the sun, and the moon” (2007, 130).

At the same time, Norma Rowen adds that the inverted Christian imagery in Dracula essentially renders the Count an antichrist, with Renfield’s phrase “the blood is the life” a parody of the Eucharist (1997, 241).

Furthermore, by calling Mina his “bountiful wine-press” (D 306), Dracula introduces a metaphor often argued to carry religious connotations. The reason is due to the fact that wine is part of the Eucharist (Kreitzer 1999, 125), but also because of the allusion to Genesis, with Mina’s vampiric baptism becoming a parody of the creation of Eve (Loughlin 2004, 204).

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