Horrorspace: Reading House of Leaves

Absence is crucial to the evocation of horror, marking out limits to sense, knowledge and representation. Linked to space, horror’s architectural, anthropological, philosophical and literary dimensions open up to darkness, emptiness, revulsion or dread, to raise questions of rationality, the sacred, home, corporeality and human subjectivity. Horror’s movements broach an otherness that is both unpresentable and intimate, imaginary and real. House of Leaves, a text situated in a fissure between modern, postmodern and post-human articulations of walls, words and webs, both registers and resists changes in contemporary modes of literary production, recording and reading. Yet, engaging digital and media forms in a dense aesthetic network of allusions, the novel’s use of familiar and disturbing spaces and figures such as house, labyrinth and void reworks horror’s textual and affective armoury. It also foregrounds generic techniques and effects like terror, doubling and excess, patterns that have been in play since the eighteenth century as modes that have preceded and enabled the emergence of post-Romantic literary values

Situating Arab women’s writing in a feminist ‘global gothic’ : madness, mothers and ghosts

This article sketches a new way of approaching some contemporary Levantine (Egyptian and Lebanese) feminist texts. Extending Glennis Byron’s notion of the ‘global gothic’, I examine Hanan Al-Shaykh’s The Story of Zahra (1986), Mansoura Ez Eldin’s Maryam’s Maze (2007) and Joumana Haddad’s The Seamstress’ Daughter (2019) as examples of an Arab feminist Gothic approach, which serves as a framework to theorise difficult and pressing questions that feminism poses regarding women’s rights. Arab feminist Gothic writers use the jahiliyyah period, or the ‘time of ignorance’, as a folkloric referential backdrop for texts which theorise the female condition under contemporary patriarchal society. The presence of ghosts, madness, doubles in the form of the folkloric qarina spirit-doubles and dreams can be read as part of a local Gothic feminist mode. This as-yet unacknowledged Arab feminist Gothic tradition, while emerging from debates over statehood and postcolonial subjectivities, delves into the intensity of personal traumas through the lens of women’s relationships to other women, especially mothers and daughters. Taking Arab feminist fiction as its focus, this article models how feminist scholarship can use genre, particularly the Gothic, to trace artistic feminist theorising in non-western contexts

Through Oceans Darkly: Sea Literature and the Nautical Gothic

No abstract available