Review of Teaching the Gothic, edited by Anna Powell and Andrew Smith

In recent years there has been a considerable growth in scholarship on the Gothic and on supporting reference materials. There has also been a growth in single volume introductory guides to the form which have been crucial in supporting our pedagogic practices (at least in the early weeks of Gothic courses). However, this book, published as part of the MLA\u27s Approaches to Teaching series, provides a much needed analysis of how we go about teaching the Gothic. The content is almost exhaustive and encompasses accounts of teaching the Gothic in fiction and in film and has chapters on a range of different authors from Walpole to Thomas Harris

Objectifying Anxieties: Scientific Ideologies in Bram Stoker’s \u3cem\u3eDracula\u3c/em\u3e and \u3cem\u3eThe Lair of the White Worm\u3c/em\u3e

Scientific ideologies swirl throughout Stoker’s two most gothic novels, Dracula (1897) and The Lair of the White Worm (1911), and this essay will address those ideologies as literary manifestations of just some of the “weird science” that was permeating late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Europe. Specifically, the essay examines racial theories, physiognomy, criminology, brain science, and sexology as they appear in Stoker’s two novels. Stoker owned a copy Johann Caspar Lavater’s five-volume edition of Essays on Physiognomy (1789), and declared himself to be a “believer of the science” of physiognomy. The second major “weird science” infecting the gothic works of Stoker is the new field of criminology, or the bourgeois attempt to codify, control, and exterminate criminal elements in the human population. Stoker drew on both Havelock Ellis’s The Criminal, published in 1890, and the Italian Cesare Lombroso’s work, Uomo Delinquente (1876), a book that was available to Stoker in a two volume French translation published as L’Homme Criminel (1895). Stoker derived a number of his passages about the workings of the brain from the theories of the well-known professor of physiology, W. B. Carpenter, founder of the notion of “unconscious cerebration,” a concept developed in his book Principles of Mental Physiology (1874). Finally, Richard von Krafft-Ebing published his pioneering text on sexuality in 1886, Psychopathia Sexualis, with Special Reference to Contrary Sexual Instinct: A Medico-Legal Study, and invented the scientific study of sex. Of a piece with criminology, sexology attempted to categorize and medicalize human behaviors in such a way that all would become clear to the informed and enlightened bourgeois consciousness. As another weirdly scientific effort to “discipline and punish,” sexology sought to transform crime into perversion, and the man or woman suffering from vampiric tendencies became just another case study of sexual deviancy

Charlotte Dacre’s \u3cem\u3eZofloya\u3c/em\u3e: A Case Study in Miscegenation as Racial and Sexual Nausea

when she was 24 years old (or so she claimed) and the beautiful toast of London literary circles. Her first novel. The Confessions of the Nun of St. Omer, was written when she was eighteen (or 28, depending on what biographical source one credits) and in the grip of an infatuation with the excessive gothicism of Lewis\u27 The Monk} Dacre\u27s novels by 1809 were ridiculed as lovely ROSA\u27s prose by Byron, who went on to mock the novels as prose in masquerade/Whose strains, the faithful echoes of her mind,/Leave wondering comprehension far behind (English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, 756-58). Despite their improbabilities or more likely because of them, Zofloya was also an early influence on Percy Shelley, whose two youthful gothic novels, Zastrozzi (1810) and St. ¡rvyne; or The Rosicrucian (1811), bear a number of clear resemblances to Dacre\u27s works. She and her four novels and two volume book of poetry are virtually forgotten today, but all of these works—most particularly Zofloya—are important historical documents for understanding how literature participated in the larger culture\u27s attempt to rewrite appropriate feminine behavior as passionless, passively domestic, and pious. Dacre was no feminist, but as the daughter of a well-connected Jewish banker and supporter of radical political causes who was friendly with William Godwin, she certainly had every opportunity to absorb the gothic and feminist ambiences and she clearly would have had access to Wollstonecraft\u27s writings. We know very little about Dacre\u27s life, but one fact remains: in Zofloya she produced a virtual parody of Wollstonecraft\u27s works and as such introduced Wollstonecraft\u27s ideas—albeit in perverted form—to a larger reading audience

The Female Captivity Narrative: Blood, Water, and Orientalism

The story of how Europeans institutionalized, commodified, and controlled their anxious projections about Muslim Others is a long, complex, and ultimately tragic saga that the term Orientalism only partially conveys. Historians as well as literary, religious, political, and cultural critics have attempted for close to four hundred years to come to terms with the meaning of Islam and more broadly with the challenges that the Eastern world presents to the West. More importantly for the purposes of this essay, it is necessary to recognize that the binary model (Self/Other) adopted by Edward Said to define Orientalism has been challenged and modified by recent feminist literary critics as both gender and class-blind