I had a bit unorthodox idea: I thought to write a post featuring a literary self-assessment of my work. In particular, I wanted to self-critique all the novels I wrote in the past eight or so years.
This might sound like an incredibly arrogant thing to do, but you can also see it as a teaching point. As you might recall, authors are the sole authority of their work, so you might want to do something similar for your own novels, taking this post as an example.
A literary self-assessment of my work can show you how to do the same for yours, highlighting your evolution as a writer.
A literary self-assessment of the seven novels I’ve written in the past eight or so years(more…)
The so-called “Southern Gothic” is a subcategory of the Gothic mode that nominally revolves around the American South – as in, the Southern US States. However, as we’ll see in this post, Southern Gothic tropes farexceed the strict topical confines of the American South. Indeed, understanding these Southern Gothic tropes can reveal hidden meaning in a vast literary space.
As is the case with the Gothic in general, the Southern Gothic, too, is difficult to pinpoint. Perhaps paradoxically, considering its (again, nominal) narrow focus, the Southern Gothic describes not a place but an experience. Though Southern Gothic tropes are generally well-defined, as we’ll soon see, their metaphorical dimensions and repercussions are far more flexible.
In simpler words: The Southern Gothic isn’t about the US South.
So, let’s take an analytic but accessible look at this intriguing subcategory of the Gothic mode. We’ll start with a basic outline of Southern Gothic tropes, and then I’ll explain what these tropes really signify. As a result, we’ll discover why the Southern Gothic framework can inform our reading of a vast number of other narratives.
As with so many other things in literature, Southern Gothic tropes are more about the “how it feels”, affect, rather than the “what it is”(more…)
Note: the following article on Vampire Capital and Social Classes in Dracula is a modified excerpt (pp. 127-131) 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 list on the main website.
The emergence of the Gothic – particularly the Victorian Gothic – can be traced to the development of the market. The mid-nineteenth century also coincides with one of the most important theoreticians on capital, Karl Marx, who used numerous Gothic metaphors for his references to capitalism:
Capital is dead labour which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks. The time during which the worker works is the time during which the capitalist consumes the labour-power he has bought from him. If the worker consumes his disposable time for himself, he robs the capitalist (342).
Additionally, there is an association between, on the one hand, ghosts and specters, and, on the other, the transcendent nature of commodities and the invisibility of wealth. The association is facilitated through the introduction of economic devices such as the stock market and the prevalence of paper money (Smith, 149–150).
Andrew Smith claims that such an element can also be found in A Christmas Carol, as Scrooge’s wealth “is both there (hoarded) and not there (not in circulation)”, with a parallel formed between the “spectrality” of money and that of ghosts (150). Scrooge becomes a prime example – if not an actual personification – of this very invisibility of wealth.
For Marx, vampire capital was an apt metaphor of how capitalism becomes engorged by parasitically sucking life out of labor(more…)
