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A crow relates the tale of Sophocles' tragedy about a young Theban pricess who decides to bury her dishonored brother, Polynices, against King Creon's orders and suffers dire consequences.

Since John Polidori in 1819 made a vampire the eponymous hero of his Romantic tale “The Vampyre,” vampires have never disappeared from the pages of collections of supernatural tales, penny dreadfuls, or horror novels. They soon migrated to theater stages and movie screens, and more recently from the pages of serialized novels to weekly episodes on television. As cultural icons, vampires are the subject matter of an impressive body of academic writing. In his studyMetamorphoses of the Vampire in Literature and Film, Erik Butler sums up: Representations of vampires in literature, film, and the visual arts are many and

In the previous chapters I showed that during the novel the protagonists move from a merely physical relationship to an experience of love focused on their mutual fidelity, in which spirituality and mutuality are additional features. In this chapter, I will point out the most profound level of this trajectory: the protagonists’ striving towards a love which will continue after death. This feature is introduced in theEphesiacathrough a depiction of Egypt that unfolds during the course of the novel.¹ To begin with, the end of Apollo’s oracle introduces Egypt as an utopian land (§ 5.2) and, then, in

As Angela Wright has noted, in Scottish Gothic literature, graves and manuscripts are ‘warmly contested sites of authenticity and authority’ (2007: 76). The burial ground excavated at the end of James Hogg's The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824) is just such a contested memorial: the grave that harbours an uncanny tale of religious fundamentalism, or diabolical possession, does not readily give up its secrets. Robert Wringhim's corpse preserves a manuscript whose provenance, and legacy, cannot be determined. The exhumed body releases its enigmatic text into circulation, and this final resting place becomes an opening to future readings. In his antiquarian or archaeological – and thus typically Gothic – effort to authenticate Wringhim's memoir, the Editor's narrative draws on ‘history, justiciary records, and tradition’ (Hogg 2002c: 64) to frame the ‘singular’ document whose ‘drift’ (2002c: 174) he cannot comprehend. Yet the ‘sequel’ to these narratives (it is actually a beginning) returns us to Hogg's home territory of the Borders. The field trip to Wringhim's grave is prompted by a letter published in Blackwood's from ‘James Hogg’, concerning the excavation of the corpse of a suicide discovered in a miraculous state of preservation. Keen to examine these ‘wonderful remains personally’, the Editor tracks down Hogg at the ewe fair in Thirlestane, but the taciturn Shepherd has no interest in exhuming this ‘Scots mummy’: ‘I hair mair ado than I can manage the day, foreby ganging to houk up hunderyear- auld bones’ (2002c: 170). Hogg refuses the role of Wordsworthian ‘rustic’ (Pope 1992: 223), eager to tell the story of the bones to a stranger (which is, precisely, ironically, what the ‘real’ James Hogg is doing). The Shepherd's letter has initially triggered the Editor's curiosity, but it warns against further disturbance of the grave, which will cause the flesh to ‘fall to dust’ (Hogg 2002c: 169). His resistance to the enterprise may suggest guilt at exposing old bones to the modern gaze, but equally the desire to see the found text trouble and perplex the enlightened reader. This ambivalent encounter between urban modernity and rural tradition, and the failure to establish an agreed account of the Scottish past and present, exemplify Hogg's brand of Gothic.

A movie poster for Clint Eastwood’sA Fistful of Dollarsdepicts a grizzled gunslinger who looks nothing like earlier cowboy heroes. He wears a beard and smokes a cigarillo. Dressed in a Mexican poncho and flat-top cowboy hat, his gun is drawn, and his menacing stare shows he is ready for business. “This is the man with no name,” explains the poster. “In his own way he is, perhaps, the most dangerous man who ever lived!” The poster adds, “A Fistful of Dollars is the first motion picture of its kind. It won’t be the last!” That proved to be

Beginning about two centuries before the end of ancient Egypt’s Old Kingdom, hieroglyphic religious texts were inscribed upon the interior walls of the pyramid tombs of kings and queens. The first king whose subterranean crypt was decorated in this way was named Unas, and his last year of reign was about 2345BCE. His pyramid complex and those of his successors were built in the great necropolis of Saqqara, which had been the favored place for royal burials already for three centuries. Egypt’s capital, Memphis, sat below the desert necropolis on the Nile, where the narrow Nile Valley opened up to

As measured by thematic content and structural approach, the works of monosyllablists such as Pollard, Pierson, Smith, and Sadlier were not substantially different from one another or from those of their predecessors in the field of popular children’s history, including Samuel Goodrich and the Abbott brothers. They employed roughly the same cast of characters in the service of comparable stories designed to reaffirm a common master narrative. The kind and frequency of repetitions that emerged from these collective works (both factual and fictional) gave birth to the impression that American history in the nineteenth century was a consensual enterprise practiced

Euro horror movies encourage performative spectatorship because of the way in which they are made. I want to be mindful of the danger of overgeneralizing about the common identity of these films, despite – or rather because of – the fact that they are regularly lumped together by their contemporary American fans. After all, Europe comprises over fifty countries, two dozen languages, and a wide array of cultural, social, economic, political, religious, and artistic traditions. The challenge that such diversity poses to anyone wanting to make grand statements about “the” nature of European cinema is obvious. As Ernest Mathjis and

In this essay I offer a comparative analysis of Charles W. Chesnutt’s The Colonel’s Dream (1905) and Sutton E. Griggs’s Pointing the Way (1908), the least appreciated and least critically analyzed works of two of the most prolific black novelists at the beginning of the twentieth century. These novels have rarely been examined in relation to each other. Yet they do not simply share a close chronological proximity and related topical concerns (including disenfranchisement, the neoslavery of segregation, and the convict-lease system). Rather, Pointing the Way is a deliberate, systematic, illuminating revision of Chesnutt’s earlier novel, and reading these works

Early in Stephen King’sPet Sematary(1983), a neighbourly act of kindness establishes a surrogate family relationship – between a symbolic father and his symbolic son – that will gather in increasingly sinister implications as the narrative develops. Jud Crandall, neighbour to the recently-moved Creed family, offers to help them treat a bee sting suffered by their infant child Gage: ‘That would be very kind of you, Mr Crandall’, Louis Creed gratefully acknowledges. And his wife Rachel repeats: ‘You’re very kind, Mr Crandall’.¹ Such acts of domestic kindness establish, at the novel’s beginning, notions of compassionate kindness; homonymically, they invoke ‘kind’ as