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Death in A Christmas Carol: The Impossible Representation

October 21, 2024

academia, criticism, death, Gothic, Victorian

It’s been a while since I shared something from my academic vault of uselessness… Well, alright; knowledge and thought are never useless; academia (the way it’s run nowadays) might be. But I digress. The following post on death in A Christmas Carol is a modified excerpt (pp. 148-149) 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.

Also take a look at my posts on religion in A Christmas Carol and, especially, Gothic Immortality in Dickens’s work – the present post forms a nice pair with the latter.

death in A Christmas Carol. Ai render of Scrooge facing the third ghost — Here’s an AI render of how an impressionist painting of the scene would’ve perhaps looked like

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Feminism in Goblin Market: the Economics of the Victorian Woman

October 11, 2021

Criticism

academia, capitalism, criticism, economy, feminism, Gothic, literature, poetry, society, Victorian

I’ve been going through a… Goblin Market phase recently, as you might recall. So, I decided to write a brief, accessible post on feminism in Goblin Market. Christina Rossetti’s poem is rich in symbolism, and an interpretation related to feminism and economics couldn’t be absent.

Academic criticism has explored feminism in Goblin Market – a lot – so I’m certainly not breaking any new ground here. After all, this post is based on my BA thesis and therefore isn’t exceptionally deep or analytic to begin with. However, I still think there are intriguing viewpoints in it, with important repercussions for our times, too.

Is feminism in Goblin Market about sex? Is it about control? It’s about these and more. Nonetheless, my focus is mostly on economic independence: how the Victorian woman (and, by association any woman) is as free as her ability to provide for herself and set the rules of the (economic) game. The lessons from the Victorian era are still applicable today, and feminism in Goblin Market is, I’d argue, pertinent to many of our contemporary discussions.

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The Meaning of Dracula’s Castle

October 20, 2019

Criticism

academia, criticism, Dracula, Gothic, reality, Victorian, vision

Note: the following article on the meaning of Dracula’s castle is a modified excerpt from my article “Philosophical Idealism and Vision in Bram Stoker’s Dracula: Photographs, Sight, and Remote Viewing as Tools of Reality Rendering”. Word and Image: Theoretical and Methodological Approaches. Tampere, Finland: Tampere University Press, 2014.

Feel free to also take a look at my other academic publications.

The importance and meaning of Dracula’s castle in the novel becomes evident for a variety of reasons. In general temporal terms, the castle of Dracula serves as a generic reminder and connects with the Gothic tradition.

Examining the text itself, the novel essentially begins and ends with the castle. In fact, the novel ends in the castle twice: the first time in Mina’s last journal entry, describing the seeming destruction of Count Dracula in his home ground (D, 401) and the second in Jonathan Harker’s note, revealing their pilgrimage of sorts to the very same place seven years later (D, 402).

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