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Art of Darkness is an ambitious attempt to describe the principles governing Gothic literature. Ranging across five centuries of fiction, drama, and verse-including tales as diverse as Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto, Shelley's Frankenstein, Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, and Freud's The Mysteries of Enlightenment-Anne Williams proposes three new premises: that Gothic is "poetic," not novelistic, in nature; that there are two parallel Gothic traditions, Male and Female; and that the Gothic and the Romantic represent a single literary tradition. Building on the psychoanalytic and feminist theory of Julia Kristeva, Williams argues that Gothic conventions such as the haunted castle and the family curse signify the fall of the patriarchal family; Gothic is therefore "poetic" in Kristeva's sense because it reveals those "others" most often identified with the female. Williams identifies distinct Male and Female Gothic traditions: In the Male plot, the protagonist faces a cruel, violent, and supernatural world, without hope of salvation. The Female plot, by contrast, asserts the power of the mind to comprehend a world which, though mysterious, is ultimately sensible. By showing how Coleridge and Keats used both Male and Female Gothic, Williams challenges accepted notions about gender and authorship among the Romantics. Lucidly and gracefully written, Art of Darkness alters our understanding of the Gothic tradition, of Romanticism, and of the relations between gender and genre in literary history. Cover -- CONTENTS -- Acknowledgments -- INTRODUCTION Gothic Fiction's Family Romances -- Part One: Riding Nightmares -- or, What's Novel about Gothic? -- ONE The Nightmare of History: Acting On and Acting Out -- TWO The House of Bluebeard: Gothic Engineering -- THREE Pope as Gothic "Novelist": Eloisa to Abelard -- FOUR Symbolization and Its Discontents -- FIVE The Nature of Gothic -- SIX Family Plots -- Part Two: Reading Nightmères -- or, The Two Gothic Traditions -- SEVEN Nightmère's Milk: The Male and Female Formulas -- EIGHT Male Gothic: Si(g)ns of the Fathers -- NINE Demon Lovers: The Monk -- TEN Why Are Vampires Afraid of Garlic? Dracula -- ELEVEN The Female Plot of Gothic Fiction -- TWELVE The Male as "Other -- THIRTEEN The Fiction of Feminine Desires: Not the Mirror but the Lamp -- FOURTEEN The Eighteenth-Century Psyche: The Mysteries of Udolpho -- Part Three: Writing in Gothic -- or, Changing the Subject -- FIFTEEN Dispelling the Name of the Father -- SIXTEEN An "I" for an Eye: The Rime of the Ancient Mariner -- SEVENTEEN "Frost at Midnight": (M)others and Other Strangers -- EIGHTEEN Keats and the Names of the Mother -- EPILOGUE The Mysteries of Enlightenment -- or, Dr. Freud's Gothic Novel -- APPENDIX A Inner and Outer Spaces: The Alien Trilogy -- APPENDIX B Gothic Families -- APPENDIX C The Female Plot of Gothic Fiction -- Bibliography -- Index.
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