From Wollstonecraft to Stoker

This collection of 13 essays examines the work of Victorian authors Wilkie Collins, M.E. Braddon, Letitia Elizabeth Landon, Mary Wollstonecraft, J. Sheridan Le Fanu, Bram Stoker, Charles Dickens, Robert Louis Stevenson, Elizabeth Gaskell, Henry James and Charlotte Brontë. Each essay explores their use of archetypal Gothic elements, such as dark secrets and forbidden sensations, to depict nineteenth-century attitudes to class, gender, race, colonialism and imperialism.

Editor Marilyn Brock is a professor and department chair of English and Humanities at Coastline Community College. She has published short fiction in Miranda Literary Magazine, Planet Magazine and other literary journals. She lives in Huntington Beach, California.

Edited by Marilyn Brock
Format: softcover (6 x 9)
Pages: 220
Bibliographic Info: notes, bibliographies, index
Copyright Date: 2009
pISBN: 978-0-7864-4021-4
eISBN: 978-0-7864-5440-2
Imprint: McFarland

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements      v

Introduction      1

Part One—The Instability of Identity: Character, Class, and Gender

Desire and Fear: Feminine Abjection in the Gothic Fiction of Mary Wollstonecraft

MARILYN BROCK      17

“The Maiden Felt Hot Pain”: Agency and Passivity in the Work of Letitia Elizabeth Landon

RICHARD FANTINA      30

“Portrait of a governess, disconnected, poor, and plain”: Staging the Spectral Self in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre

LAURENCE TALAIRACH-VIELMAS      49

A Shock to the System, a System to the Shocks: The Horrors of the “Happy Ending” in The Woman in White

JUDITH SANDERS      62

Hysterical Sensations: Bodies in Action in Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White

ELIZABETH ANDERMAN      79

Part Two—The Colonial Context of Gothic and Sensation Fiction

Sensations Down Under: Australia’s Seismic Charge in Great Expectations and Lady Audley’s Secret

JULIE M. BARST      91

Reading Between the (Blood)lines of Victorian Vampires: Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s “Good Lady Ducayne”

SAVERIO TOMAIUOLO      102

The Vamp and the Good English Mother: Female Roles in Le Fanu’s Carmilla and Stoker’s Dracula

MARILYN BROCK      120

Liminality and Power in Bram Stoker’s Jewel of Seven Stars

KATE HOLTERHOFF      132

Part Three—Fallen Woman, Fallen Man in the Victorian Novel

Ruth: An Analysis of the Victorian Signifieds

MARIA GRANIC-WHITE      147

Violence as Patrimony in Le Fanu’s Uncle Silas

STEPHANIE KING      164

In the Company of Men: Masculinity Gone Wild in Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr Hyde

JENNIFER BEAUVAIS      172

Ghostly Absence and Sexual Presence in James’s “Owen Wingrave” and “The Jolly Corner”

NICHOLAS HARRIS      193

About the Contributors      207

Index      211