Explore the vast range of titles available.

This iconoclastic book challenges and changes accepted opinions about the Gothic novel, and will introduce the British and American Reader to works hitherto unknown to them, but rivals in quality to the works of writers like Radcliffe, Lewis and Stoker.

In describing his proto-Gothic fiction, The Castle of Otranto (1764), as a translation, Horace Walpole was deliberately playing on national anxieties concerning the importation of war, fashion and literature from France in the aftermath of the Seven Years' War. In the last decade of the eighteenth century, as Britain went to war again with France, this time in the wake of revolution, the continuing connections between Gothic literature and France through the realms of translation, adaptation and unacknowledged borrowing led to strong suspicions of Gothic literature taking on a subversive role in diminishing British patriotism. Angela Wright explores the development of Gothic literature in Britain in the context of the fraught relationship between Britain and France, offering fresh perspectives on the works of Walpole, Radcliffe, 'Monk' Lewis and their contemporaries.

This examination of Zoo City (2010) by Lauren Beukes calls for a reimagining of denigrated South African urban spaces and their inhabitants. Drawing primarily on the work of Julia Kristeva and Judith Butler, it investigates the making of abject spaces and subjectivities, suggesting that novels such as Beukes's might allow for readers to see anew so-called slums such as inner-city Hillbrow. It proposes that readers might come to know such spaces and subjectivities more intimately, bringing otherwise marginalised characters and their urban spaces more sharply into focus. This analysis of Beukes's novel considers the role of \"ex-centric\" fiction, fiction that challenges privileged centres of \"belonging.\" Ultimately, this paper explores the potential for resistance such literature might have in the face of the dehumanising impact of othering and abjectification in post-apartheid South Africa.

In writing about Political Gothic fiction in the Romantic period two vexed questions confront us. First, in what sense is any Gothic fiction of the period political? Secondly, what is the difference between political Gothic fiction and the Jacobin novel? The essayist and critic William Hazlitt famously commented that Ann Radcliffe’s romances ‘ derived part of their interest, no doubt, from the supposed tottering state of all old structures at the time’ (Hazlitt 1907: 73). With his dissenting background Hazlitt understood this interest to be political (Paulin 1999); the ‘tottering of old structures’ clearly signalled the present Revolutionary age, and

This article will outline the aspects of influence and allusion in the novel, with reference to Victorian Gothic, classical mythology, the psychological double, monster theory, the Faustian bargain, the mask and a prominent memento mori in Huysmans' A Rebours, his description of Rodolphe Bresdin's lithograph, 'The Comedy of Death'. Wilde's novel is a complex, multi-layered text, and a richer, more profound understanding of it becomes possible when it is situated within this context of influence and allusion.

[...]the science fictional premise of Ultravioleta suggests an at least rough parallel to Dodie Bellamy's adoption of the gothic aesthetic and vampire tale in The Letters of Mina Harker. Below is a list of the main personae and their \"species\": Stella: a human and writer, flying her own (metal) ship, the Nautilus; Ada: a clone, and the powerful director of the Gutenberg Library Hotel on Europa, a moon of Jupiter, and the limit of navigable space; Cap: a robot; Eddie: a Martian human who operates continual radio broadcasts from a café on Mars and writes under the pen name, Stendhal; Pontius Pilate: an I who contains the consciousness of the notorious Roman governor of Judaea and who will eventually pilot the paper ship, the Ultravioleta; Wyatt: an I who contains the consciousness of both the Elizabethan poet Thomas Wyatt and the gambler and sometime deputy marshal of Tombstone, Arizona, Wyatt Earp; Marty: an I who designed and navigates Ultravioleta and contains the consciousness of the Tonalist painter Xavier Martinez; M.: a female I, also a Mary (a pilot); Tinia So-Called: a space-traveling Martian and researcher; Najid Jones: a human poet; Dayv: A human-I hybrid, the offspring of Ada and Wyatt (although Ada only learns this late in the novel); Robinson: a human involved with \"M\"; the human passengers of the Ultravioleta are also referred to as \"Robinsons\" and at times their consciousnesses merge into a single \"Robinson.\" [...]the acts of reading and writing are integral to these networks in this I-inflected extension of consciousnesses. How far can I go?\" (15-16) Partially because of the way the I can insinuate themselves within a human consciousness and partially because of the communication-saturated universe the characters live in, individual psychological states are often rendered as technologized modes of either awareness or presence.

Kyōka Izumi (1873-1939) has been renowned as representative of Japanese fantastic literature since the 1970s, although he was not highly estimated during his lifetime. He is generally regarded as an emotional writer representing old Japan. The writer, however, had a keen analytical eye on literary discourses, examining structural and technical characteristics of Western fantastic fiction and Japanese horror-story telling. His taste of twilight or in-betweenness urged him to categorize various matters into binary groups, including Western supernatural literature. This article exhibits how this writer’s analyses on narrative discourses, Western influence on his works, and his liking for in-betweenness, strikingly and coincidently, allowed him to write stories having clear similarities with the features of fantastic literature theorized by Tzvetan Todorov in The Fantastic. Investigating his works’ characteristics sharing the common ground with Western fantastic literature, it intends to reconsider why Kyōka can be regarded as one of greatest fantasists of Japanese literature.

Drawing upon Denis Mellier's call for an integrative perspective (Fantastique 10), I give the following definition of the genre as consensually accepted in Francophone cultures and upon which this article relies: set in the contemporary everyday world of its author-and of his/her readers-a fantastic fiction narrative depicts \"une intrusion brutale du mystere dans le cadre de la vie réelle\" (Castex 8), a brutal intrusion of mystery into a rational and lifelike fictional world. Drawing upon the Genettian concept of the narrative metalepsis to perform a structural analysis of Patrick Senécal's metaleptic novel Aliss, I show in this article how a writing technique that plays on the transgression of ontological levels is the perfect instrument for a genre that plays on its own fictionality. In the first section, I explain how, in fantastic fiction, the feeling of the uncanny taken in its Freudian understanding works with Genette's narrative metalepsis. In the second section, I present the two kinds of metalepses in Senécal's novel: the authorial metalepsis and the internal metalepsis. The three-level structure of the story and the intertextual relations of these diegetic levels then lead me to the third section where I examine the transgression of boundaries between reality and fiction in Aliss, generating the feeling of the uncanny per se in the novel.

Book review. Source: National Library of New Zealand Te Puna Matauranga o Aotearoa, licensed by the Department of Internal Affairs for re-use under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 New Zealand Licence.