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"Gaiman, Neil"
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‘The Swallowed Beloved’: Corporeality and Incorporation in Neil Gaiman’s IThe Graveyard Book/I
In keeping with the focus of this special edition of Humanities on the political child, this article builds on investigations into constructions of the child body in literature and society to examine how portrayals of the child body in Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book repeatedly slip under the varying perspectives of the adults; that is, how adult politics are always at play in understandings of children and childhood both within and outside of the text. In taking this approach, this article focuses on two key texts in literary discussions of spectrality, bodies, and signification—Hamlet and ‘Fors’—to consider how the paradoxical child body in Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book is both constructed within the adult perspective and constantly slips from it, and how Gaiman approaches the issue at the heart of this analysis: that of who gets to decide who or what a child is, should be, or can be.
Journal Article
The graveyard book
Nobody Owens, known to his friends as Bod, is a normal boy. He would be completely normal if he didn't live in a sprawling graveyard, being raised and educated by ghosts, with a solitary guardian who belongs to neither the world of the living nor of the dead. There are dangers and adventures in the graveyard for a boy. But if Bod leaves the graveyard, then he will come under attack from the man Jack -- who has already killed Bod's family.
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Aesthetic Universals in Neil Gaiman’s Post-Postmodern Mythmaking
Aesthetic theory, as reflected in both contemporary cognitive (Patrick Colm Hogan) and more traditional structuralist criticism (H.G. Widdowson), points to the dynamics between familiarity and surprise as the driving force behind the pleasure we derive from reading fiction. This paper explains how Neil Gaiman’s works, particularly his novel Neverwhere, utilize genre expectations and reinvent mythologies in order to captivate audiences in the current age of unprecedented access to information and a rather superficial intertextuality. The paper draws on Brian Attebery’s analyses of the literature of the fantastic to place Gaiman within the context of both modernist and postmodernist legacies, while proposing that his works could be best understood as representative of the current cultural paradigm, sometimes labelled as the pseudo-modern or post-postmodernism. The discussion of the shifting paradigm is used as a backdrop for the scrutiny of the devices employed in Gaiman’s writing: the pre-modern focus on storytelling, prototypicality, modernist “mythic principle”, postmodernist textual strategies, and utilization of current technologies and mass-communication media.
Journal Article
Trials and Tribulations in London Below
Neil Gaiman is a highly acclaimed British author of novels, short fiction, film scripts, graphic novels, and radio plays. His first novel, Neverwhere, was his attempt to fill in the blanks left by the television series with the same name, by writing down everything that he could not fit into the restrictive television format. This paper analyses the novel through the lens of structuralism and poststructuralism, in order to reveal inherent social critique, artfully concealed in a game of complex urban imagery, chronotopic structures and intertextual references.
Neil Gaiman es un aclamado autor británico de novelas, relatos breves, guiones cinematográficos, novelas gráficas y obras para la radio. Su primera novela, Neverwhere, fue su intento de rellenar los espacios en blanco de la serie de televisión con el mismo nombre, añadiendo todo lo que no podía encajar en el restrictivo formato televisivo. Este artículo analiza la novela a través de la óptica del estructuralismo y el postestructuralismo, con el fin de revelar la crítica social inherente, oculta artísticamente bajo un un juego de imágenes urbanas complejas, estructuras cronotópicas y referencias intertextuales.
Journal Article
The dream of the city: fear e interaction in the imagined metropolis/O sonho da cidade: medo e interacao na metropole imaginada/El sueno de la ciudad: miedo e interaccion en la metropoli imaginada
Contemporary metropolises, where ephemerality and speed assume fundamental economic roles, propitiate the emergence of ambiances and imaginaries about ideal or dream cities. In this paper, we aim to study, from a reading of the anthropology of emotions and urban studies, an evasion situation: the fantastic short story A Tale of Two Cities, from the Sandman comics, by Neil Gaiman. In the short story, the dream city becomes a labyrinth of significations from which individuals seek to escape. Methodologically, from a qualitative, hermeneutic-interpretative perspective, we read text and images from the comic, observing the imagined city as an attempt of evasion driven by the question about how fear and mediatized interaction produce meanings about the contemporary city. As a preliminary result, we observed that in the comic the individual is divided between the security of private space and the desire to launch himself into the unknown space, to encounters and death.
Journal Article
“Give the devil his due”: Freedom, Damnation, and Milton’s Paradise Lost in Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman: Season of Mists
In their collection Milton in Popular Culture (2006), Laura Lungers Knoppers and Gregory M. Colón Semenza have established the importance of Miltonic intertextuality in popular culture, while recognizing the importance of William Blake to the field. Blake’s definition of Milton as “a true Poet and of the Devils party without knowing it” in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1793) lies at the centre of a main concern of Milton criticism since the poem’s original publication. The debate between Satanists and anti-Satanists goes back even further than Blake and the Romantics, and this central ambivalence is representative of the “discontinuities” and “irresolvable complexities” which Peter C. Herman and Elizabeth Sauer (2012) argue are the focus of interest of the New Milton Criticism. Following this strand of critical thought, this article proposes to show how the introduction of Miltonic intertext into Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman , in issues 21–28, serves to structure the series’ theme of change and death — which involve questions of freedom and teleology, free will and damnation — through a critical dialogue with, and creative rewriting of Miltonic theodicy in the epic poem. Gaiman draws upon the ambivalent theological dimensions of Paradise Lost not to present his own concept of good and evil but rather to discuss the freedom to change and the damnation inherent in the inability to change as part of the human condition.
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The Wart, the Wizard, and the Cathedral
Applying C.S. Lewis' metaphor of authors being cathedral-builders to understand intertextual writing (combining influences with innovation) provides a fascinating lens to understand T.H. White's Arthurian work. Exploring how White's The Once and Future King influenced J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter series (particularly her characters Vernon and Dudley Dursley) provides a particularly interesting example of how fantasy authors use intertextuality to create original works.
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