Search

Nineteenth-century critics saw in Baudelaire, author of the poem «Une charogne», the heir to the macabre and mystifying inspiration of Petrus Borel, nicknamed “the lycanthrope”. This rapprochement, very frequent in the years 1860-1890, irritated Baudelaire, who had a deep sympathy for Borel while considering him as a counter-example. This context explains why the article that Baudelaire published on Borel in the “Revue fantaisiste” on July 15, 1861, has a strong polemical tinge.

U radu je analiziran prozni opus Frana Galovića koji obiluje prizorima smrti i ostalim motivima povezanima s njom. Prikazi smrti predstavljeni su kronološki prema godini nastanka djela, ali i grupirani i objašnjeni prema stilskim odrednicama. Galović neprekidno mijenja i modificira svoj stav o smrti, a osobito u kasnijim radovima zanima ga i problem onoga što dolazi poslije smrti. Sve to rezultira vrtlogom ubojstava i samoubojstava, odnosno sveprožimajućim mrtvačkim plesom (danse macabre), pa i svojevrsnom fascinacijom smrću i rušenjem svih barijera te, po nekim istraživačima, njegovim ponajboljim djelima, ali i povezanošću s biografskim elementima. Prikaz smrti i sa smrću povezanih fenomena u manje istraživanom području Galovićeve proze nametnuo nam se, stoga, kao poseban rakurs u tumačenju djela ovoga pisca., This paper analyses the prose of Fran Galović, which abounds in death scenes and motifs related to it. The depictions of death are arranged chronologically according to the year of origin, but also grouped and explained according to stylistic determinants. Galović constantly changes and modifies his attitude about death, and especially in later works he is interested in the problem of what comes after death. His thoughts result in a whirlwind of suicides, dance macabre, fascination with death and breaking down all barriers. According to some theorists, those represent his best works, and a connection with biographical elements. The portrayal of death and death-related phenomena in the less researched area of Galović’s prose has therefore imposed as a necessary way of interpreting this writer.

Edgar Allan Poe's personal religious feeling may have been uncertain, but the influence of the Bible on his works is not in question. Poems such as “The Raven” and “Annabel Lee,” for instance, allude to ideal states not unlike that described in the creation story of Genesis, particularly the scriptural verses depicting the Garden of Eden. As in the biblical creation story—which provides the literary model of “paradise”—so in these poems: death has a lasting and adverse effect on happiness. In Genesis and “Annabel Lee,” moreover, malign influence undoes archetypal innocence. In much of his prose, too, Poe includes (sometimes telling) rhetorical references to the creation story, from the forbidden wisdom of “Ligeia” to the picturesque vale of “Landor's Cottage.” Allegorically, though, Poe's short story “The Black Cat” treats the creation story of Genesis 1–4 remarkably fully, moving beyond allusion as it essentially retells those chapters of Genesis in macabre form, describing an ideal state, original sin, and murder—the very outline of the biblical narrative itself.

The concepts ‘classical antiquity’ and ‘heavy metal music’ may appear to be worlds apart. Not only are they separated chronologically but each belongs to an entirely different habitus. While the classical is associated with tradition, good taste and harmony, heavy metal is, at least by some, associated with the very opposite: the breaking of tradition, bad taste and disharmony. And yet, as the present book shows, a very large number of heavy metal bands reference antiquity in various ways, including exponents of Thrash Metal, characterised by speed and aggressiveness; Death Metal, characterised by macabre subject matter and growling vocals; Black Metal with related subject matter but less polished style, and other subgenres. Bands from countries ranging from Greece and Italy to Scandinavia incorporate classical quotations in their lyrics or rewrite ancient texts and myths. Some sing in Greek or Latin, others in Italian or English. The titles of songs, such as Hymn to Apollo, Hymn to Zeus, Medusa and so on, further show the classical inspiration.

This research paper offers a stylistic analysis of some selected poems of Wystan Hugh Auden's war poetry. It focuses on four major poems: 'O What is that Sound', 'Danse Macabre', 'Spain 1937' and 'September1, 1939'. These poems represent the period of the thirties of the twentieth century. The research shows how Auden skillfully uses the foregrounding-backgrounding approach in presenting his poems. In so doing, the researcher uses the following theoretical framework: simple repetition, parallelism and deviation. The research paper investigates mainly these levels of linguistic deviations: discoursal, grammatical and graphological, morphological and lexical, and semantic. The researcher concludes that Auden is a great poet because his poems could keep him alive even after his death. His poetry still needs a lot of work. Key Words: Stylistics, W. H. Auden, Foregrounding, repetition, parallelism and deviation. المستخلص: يعرض هدا البحث تحليل أسلوبي لبعض قصائد الحرب للشاعر ويستان هيو أودن. يرکز البحث على أربع قصائد رئيسيه هي: "اوه ما هدا الصوت", "رقصه الموت", "أسبانيا 1937 ", و "سبتمبر1,1939". تمثل تلک القصائد فتره الثلاثينيات من القرن العشرين. يوضح البحث کيفيه الاستخدام الماهر لأودن لأسلوب الوضع في المقدمه والخلفيه في عرضه لقصائده. وفي هدا الشأن يستخدم الباحث الاطار النظري التالي: التکرار البسيط, التماثل, و الانحراف. يتناول البحث المستويات التاليه للانحرافات اللغويه: الخطاب, القواعد و الجرافولوجيا أوالخط, ترکيب الکلمه والمفردات, و المعاني. و يخلص الباحث الى أن أودن شاعر عظيم لأن قصائده استطاعت أن تبقيه على قيد الحياه حتى بعد وفاته. فشعر أودن لا يزال بحاجه لمزيد من الدراسه. کلمات مفتاحيه: أسلوبيات, أودن, الوضع في المقدمه, التکرار, التماثل, و الانحراف.

The article centers on close readings of Iurii Tarich’s little studied film Wings of a Serf (1926) and the life and times of the archaeologist Ignatii Iakovlevich Stelletskii (1878–1949), who obsessively sought to discover the legendary library of Ivan the Terrible, thought to lie concealed beneath the Moscow Kremlin. These examples show the peculiar fascination of early Soviet audiences with the tsarist past in its most extreme expressions of violence and cruelty. The alluring, frightening early Soviet Ivan the Terrible demonstrates post-Revolutionary society’s queasy sense that the excesses of the old regime threatened to reemerge in the new, Soviet era. The conclusion of the article considers how the Stalinist period, both in its unprecedented bloodshed and violence and in its positive myth of Ivan the Terrible as a great leader despite his cruelty, fulfilled this fearful anticipation in ways that could not have been foreseen in the 1920s. This macabre return of a superseded past undergirded the one Stalinist representation of Ivan to revisit the 1920s Gothic image of the tsar, Sergei Eisenstein’s ambivalent portrayal of despotic power and violence in his uncompleted film trilogy Ivan the Terrible (1942–1944).

El artículo se propone analizar la forma en que en la Gran conquista de Ultramar se elabora el relato de los actos antropofágicos atribuidos a los cristianos en el marco de las cruzadas. Con este propósito se considera la tradición textual previa de la que abreva la crónica, para luego examinar las particularidades del episodio en su versión castellana, donde el hecho adquiere la forma de un banquete festivo y gozoso celebrado por los tahúres, los más pobres entre los cruzados. Se destaca especialmente, como el rasgo más notable del relato, el humor macabro que impregna la narración. Este análisis permite poner de relieve el modo en que un texto complejo, como la GCU, articula historia y procedimientos ficcionales en su representación de hechos del pasado, lo que la sitúa en una posición intermedia y crucial en el proceso de emergencia y primer desarrollo de la prosa de ficción en lengua vernácula., The aim of this paper is to analyse the way in which the Gran Conquista de Ultramar deals with the narration of the anthropophagic acts attributed to Christians during the Crusades. To this purpose, the textual tradition from which the chronicle draws its materials is briefly considered, and then we proceed to examine the particularities of the episode in the Castilian version, where the event is presented as a festive and joyous banquet celebrated by the Tafurs, the poorest among the crusaders. The macabre humour that pervades the episode stands out as its most notable feature, but not the only noteworthy one. The analysis makes it possible to highlight how a complex text, such as the GCU, articulates history and fictional procedures in its representation of past events, allowing us to place it in an intermediate and crucial position in the process of the emergence and early development of fictional prose in vernacular language., Facultad de Humanidades y Ciencias de la Educación

This chapter examines the short tales of terror commonly known as Gothic chapbooks. These tales appeared as a result of the popularity of works by Matthew Lewis and Ann Radcliffe and were read by readers of all classes. The small pamphlets were sold individually and appeared in both periodical and serial form. While some chapbooks were adaptations both of popular Gothic novels and melodramas, the majority were original tales by authors including Isaac Crookenden and Sarah Wilkinson. Their influence extended not only to larger collections of macabre and sensational anthologies, but in countless periodicals as short tales of terror.

The article relates to the issue of the suffering body in Juliusz Słowacki’s drama 'Sen srebrny Salomei'. The first and the second part of the article are dedicated to the description of the main drama characters who are media of supernatural reality, and the analysis of the co‑existing worlds of human beings and spirits. The third part includes the interpretation of the ‘poetics of macabre’ and ‘theater of pain’, the phenomenon of vivisection and the ontology of ‘human remains’. The author reads Słowacki’s drama through the prism of Michel Henry’s philosophy of existence.

Some of the work featured in this book focuses on longstanding participants who form a significant but smallish older minority within music and/or style communities which remain somewhat dominated by younger people. In these examples, we might argue that the scenes or communities themselves remain fairly clearly within the category of youth cultures in the traditional sense. In spite of their overall longevity, the membership of such groups has a substantial age-related turnover, through the falling off of many participants during their twenties and their replacement by waves of younger recruits. As many studies within this volume and elsewhere have shown, the continuing participation of a minority in their 30s, 40s and beyond within such longstanding youth cultures provokes important research questions and conclusions. As the first of three chapters on the subject of ageing scenes, however, this chapter considers a related but distinct scenario, one in which whole scenes or subcultures gradually become older. In this situation, ‘continuing scenes’, as Smith puts it, remain, at least to an extent, populated by ‘the same body of continuing participants’ (Smith 2009: 428). Here the tendency for participants to fall away during their twenties is less marked, with substantial numbers remaining involved well into adulthood and towards middle-age. In some cases this may combine with a reduction or arrest in the recruitment of new teenage participants. Rather than finding themselves in a small minority within primarily adolescent cultures, an adult critical mass of participants may find themselves growing up together. This chapter explores a case study of such a scenario in the form of the goth scene and, more specifically, a particular twice yearly goth festival which has been taking place in the seaside town of Whitbyi in the North East of the UK for approximately fifteen years. The goth scene emerged in the early 1980s and has, during its three decades, been centred consistently on distinctive and recognisable forms of dark, macabre music and fashion – most obviously in the form of black hair and clothing. Notwithstanding apparently similar yet somewhat separate recent adolescent developments such as emo, the established goth scene has undergone a substantial increase in its average age, especially since the late 1990s when I first conducted research on the subculture (Hodkinson 2002). This broader change has manifested itself in a particularly concentrated fashion at the Whitby Gothic Weekend (or WGW), a festival oriented to the scene which tended particularly to appeal to older and longer-term participants. Drawing on participant observation and interview research carried out at the festival in 2010, I briefly explore participants’ changing experience of the event as they became older. I show how developments in the personal life trajectories of individuals were closely connected to a broader evolvement in the feel, ambiance and character of the festival itself. And while many such changes were somewhat informal, some had become institutionalised, not least in the format and content of organised events and activities and the nature of the clothes, accessories and other consumables being sold by subcultural retailers.

In contrast with the many luckless physical falls elsewhere in Alex de la Iglesia’s oeuvre, the protagonist’s macabre plunge onto a steel spike in La chispa de la vida (2011) is more than a cartoonish gag staged merely in the service of dark humour. The resultant form of immobility wrought upon the body of Roberto, an unemployed advertising executive, allegorically serves as the socio-economic conceit at the heart of the film, and (following Mitchell and Snyder’s theory of disability as ‘narrative prosthesis’) as an unlikely source of the film’s very motion as a screen story. At once contextualizing La chispa in relation to a long tradition of Spanish cine inmobiliario (cinema discursively engaged with immovable property), this essay will examine the film’s timely and unusual satirical take on Spain’s recent ladrillo bust, as well as its self-conscious reflections on media and popular culture’s narrative representations thereof: stories caught up, like the main character’s own body, in the machinations of inmobiliaria, much as La chispa itself is a screen story predicated on professional, financial and physical immobility.

Article is devoted to the last vocal works a cappella created Gyorgy Ligeti in 1980 — the 1990th years: “Drei Phantasien nach Fridrich Holderlin”, “Magyar Etudok” and “Nonsense Madrigals”. The author traces relationship between the previous and last choral opuses by the master, between Ligeti’s choral works and choral creativity of his predecessors and contemporaries. So the author reveals features of ligeti’s late choral style: at the levels of relationship between word and music, the texture and timbre organization. The author pays special attention to studying of Ligeti’s neomadrigalism. This phenomenon proves in the organization of musical texture, in interaction of musical and literary texts and also in the general organization of compositions. The opposition of love and death (immemorial categories of human life) is the cornerstone of the dramaturgic organization of a cycle and typical for Ligeti’s vocal works “polyphony of meanings” is shown in the constant present genre and style game with the recipient. The composition intended for “The King’s singers” embodies diverse style hints, corresponding to the wide performing range of this ensemble and own musical interests of the composer. In this last vocal work by Ligeti also his love to literary world of Lewis Carroll with the atmosphere of absurdity, so conformable to the music world of the author of “Le Grand Macabre” was reflected.

In July 1922, theNew York Timesreported that the “encouraging little film”Danse Macabrewas screening at the Rialto Theater in New York City. Directed by filmmaker Dudley Murphy, it starred dancers Adolph Bolm and Ruth Page in a visual interpretation of Saint-Saëns'sDanse Macabrethat synchronized perfectly with live performances of the composition. While film scholars have occasionally citedDanse Macabreand Murphy's other shorts from this period as examples of early avant-garde filmmaking in the United States, discussions of the films are mired in misunderstanding. In this article, I use advertisements, reviews, and other archival materials to trace the production, exhibition, and reception of Murphy's Visual Symphony project. These films, I argue, were not Murphy's alone: rather, they were a collaborative endeavor guided as heavily by musician and film exhibitor Hugo Riesenfeld as by Murphy himself. Recast in this way, the Visual Symphony project highlights evolving approaches to sound–image synchronization in the 1920s, the centrality of theater conductors and musicians to filmmaking in this period, and the various ways in which filmmakers, performers, and exhibitors conceptualized the relationship between music and film, and the live and the mediated, in the final decade of the silent era.

This chapter contends that circus arts rely on technological invention of apparatus to advance athletic and aesthetic innovation, and that this process then influences wider social practice. The Hanlon (Hanlon-Lees) Brothers set new limits in acrobatic action with aerial technology for their nineteenth-century circus act, subsequently developing the safety net for flying trapeze and inventing new stage machinery for pantomime in their macabre theatre. The rebound action on the safety net in circus inspired the twentieth-century invention of the trampoline by George Nissen, and trampoline and its action became a leisure activity, a new circus act and an Olympic sport. This chapter asks: What theatrical emotions intersect with these performance technologies? It finds that the Hanlon-Lees (during the 1860–1870s) and Nissen (in the 1930–1940s) undertook their early artistic activity in a society under threat of war, but that they performed divergent emotional responses to risk and fear within society. Both included nonhuman animals in the performance—in support of impressions of frightening menace and comic death in the Hanlon-Lees’ theatre, and to reassure the public with comic playfulness in Nissen’s performance.

Th e paper demonstrates the prominence of network narratives ( fi lms with several autonomous storylines, globally popular since the mid- 1990 s) in post-Yugoslav, particularly Croatian, cinema, with examples such as Metastases ( 2009 ), Th e Reaper ( 2014 ), You Carry Me ( 2015 ), Th e Constitution ( 2016 ), Th e Trampoline ( 2017 ), etc. Unlike network narratives elsewhere, these fi lms o ft en thematize history, with parallel stories typically set during World War II and the Yugoslav Wars of the 1990 s. Th is has been said to suggest as a circular, synchronic vision of history, a “transhistorical dance macabre” as a leitmotif of Balkan cinema. Th e fi lms Witnesses ( 2003 ) and Th e High Sun ( 2015 ), together with a group of multi-narrative plays, i.e. Th e Last Link ( 1994 ) , 3 Winters ( 2014 ) and Men of Wax ( 2016 ), are analysed as vehicles of counter-memory to such self-Balkanizing representations.

The concept of time-image (image temps) coined by Gilles Deleuze could be applied to analysis of works of art that juxtapose objects from different periods of time and combine them into spatial installation-projects. Such exhibitions are designed for the visitor to create their final and ideal version, and have to be "performed". This leads to the obliteration of clear concepts as well as to the process of self-creation. Agnė Narušytė uses the concept of time-image as well as Erika Fischer-Lichte’s theory of performative aesthetics in her phenomenological analysis of the exhibition "Parents’ Room", which was installed by the Lithuanian contemporary artist Aurelija Maknytė at the gallery Artifex in 2015. In "Parents’ Room", Maknytė created layers of different periods and places as experienced by different people: a tailor who wrote letters to her daughter from 1965 to 1990, Maknytė’s parents, already dead, and herself in two roles: that of a daughter and of a step-mother. The artist does not mask the separateness of the layers; she even reveals the sources: fragments of a family’s life, printed materials she collects, artefacts made for different purposes (soviet folded tables for celebrations, shoes for funerals, a sewing machine, sewing patterns cut from soviet newspapers), her own works (an artist’s book compiling the tailor’s letters, "Father’s Act" created in 2001 from her father’s autopsy report and "The Role" – an appropriated film by Rūta Šimkaitienė, "The Gardener goes to the Cemetery" (1992) where Maknytė played a step-mother). Both comic and macabre, the stories of other people’s lives are condensed in the exhibits installed in the three spaces of the gallery. Like in multiple exposure photographs, the exhibition connects realities that "have no clue" about each other but are interlinked through accidental coincidences, invisible to them, but planned by The viewer becomes an all-seeing privileged connoisseur from the "future" who gets also involved into the exhibition’s narrative, thus forming an additional layer. The viewer who walks around the exhibition and sees, hears as well as feels its elements one by one links them to each other and deciphers different flows of time in this Deleuzian time-image (image temps). Therefore, this actual viewer performs the exhibition and creates herself, and through her, exhibition is created (actualized) as well. Although Maknytė has planned the audience’s movements and responses, it is impossible to envision the final result, which is characteristic of performative acts. Thus, Narušytė’s walk through the exhibition, while carrying out an experiment of phenomenological investigation of lived experience, should be also considered as part of the exhibition creating itself and her own self as becoming.

A number of Soviet artists were working in 1918 on the emblem of the RSFSR that became four years later the basis for the Soviet coat of arms. Sergey Vasilievich Chekhonin was the one who gave the coat of arms and the flag of the newlyborn Russian Federation their final form. The symbol, expressive and stripped of the macabre meaning of the reality behind it, found an impeccable composition and form by virtue of one of the most virtuous and talented Russian graphics. Chekhonin’s artistic heritage has not been studied enough. The author of the article, based upon study of bibliographic rarities, illustrated and designed by Chekhonin, addresses the most important pages of the master’s creative work, studying as well the publications of the late 1910s–1920s, and diaries of that time. Chekhonin’s enthusiasm and keenness in cooperating with the new uthority, and working on Soviet emblems, bewildered his fans. The article examines hekhonin’s attitude to contemporary events in the aspect of the topic “Mir iskusstva” and the Revolution. Members of Mir iskusstva community, having sympathetically met the overthrow of the autocracy, ever since the October Revolution were ready to take an active part in the work on the protection of architectural monuments and museum treasures, on improving artistic pedagogy, publishing and theater business. However, their enthusiasm soon gave way to a feeling of anxiety and frustration. In the mid-1920s, many of Mir iskusstva members found themselves abroad. Chekhonin was no exception. The artist developed critical and skeptical mood, most fully manifested in his illustrations to The Monster Cockroach, a famous fable in verse by Korney Chukovsky. Analyzing the text of The Cockroach and comparing it with other fables by Chukovsky, as well as with the diary entries of the writer, the author of the article argues that The Cockroach was not addressed exclusively to children. It is not by chance that the image of a ‘monster cockroach’ also appeared in the ominous poem by Osip Mandelstam (Tarakan’i smeyutsya glazishcha i sverkayut yego golenishcha… (“The Cockroach’s eyes are laughing, and the shafts of his boots are shining...”)); further on, in the famous play by Evgeny Shvarts, the Cockroach grew to the size of a giant dragon. Chekhonin undoubtedly caught an adult intonation of Chukovsky’s fables; his illustrations to it became a kind of an alternative to the official Soviet heraldry created by him., Над созданием в 1918 г. эмблемы РСФСР, ставшей четыре года спустя основой герба Советского Союза, работало несколько художников. Но законченный вид гербу и флагу Российской Федерации придал Сергей Васильевич Чехонин. Благодаря таланту едва ли не самого виртуозного из русских графиков емкий по смыслу и, конечно, неповинный в оказавшихся за ним жизненных реалиях символ нашел совершенную композиционную форму. Наследие Чехонина недостаточно исследовано. Автор настоящей статьи, основанной на изучении ставших библиографической редкостью изданий, иллюстрированных и оформленных Чехониным, на публикациях конца 1910–1920-х гг., на дневниках того времени, обращается к важнейшим страницам творчества мастера. Поклонников таланта Чехонина удивило, с каким энтузиазмом и увлеченностью он начал сотрудничать с новой властью, работать над советской эмблематикой. В статье отношение Чехонина к современным событиям рассматривается в русле темы «”Мир искусства” и революция». Сочувственно встретив свержение самодержавия, «мирискусники» готовы были и после Октябрьского переворота принимать активное участие в работе по охране архитектурных памятников и музейных сокровищ, по совершенствованию художественной педагогики, издательского и театрального дела. Однако вскоре энтузиазм сменился чувством тревоги и неудовлетворенности. В середине 1920-х гг. многие из «мирискусников» оказались за пределами Советского Союза. Не составил исключения и Чехонин. У художника нарастали критические и скептические настроения, наиболее полно проявившиеся в иллюстрациях к сказке Корнея Чуковского «Тараканище». Анализируя текст «Тараканища», сопоставляя его с другими сказками Чуковского, с дневниковыми записями писателя, автор статьи убеждает, что «Тараканище» адресован не только детям. Не случайно образ «Тараканища» в 1930-е гг. возник в роковом стихотворении Осипа Мандельштама («Тараканьи смеются глазища и сверкают его голенища…»), а в известной пьесе Евгения Шварца он вырос до размеров гигантского дракона. Чехонин, несомненно, уловил недетскую интонацию сказки Чуковского: его иллюстрации к ней стали своего рода альтернативой созданной им советской геральдики.

The impact of Elizabeth Bishops maternal loss on the symbolic order of her poetry is well established. Victoria Harrison (1993) pays attention to the various appearances of Bishop's mother, Gertrude Bulmer Bishop, in unpublished drafts such as "A mother made of dress-goods" and "Swan-boat ride" and in the short story "In the Village." Susan McCabe approaches Bishop in light of Freud's thinking about the fort-da game and Lacan's meconnaissance to argue that the lack of close parental relationships, particularly with her mother, was fundamental to Bishop's writing: "Bishop's vision and language ... are molded by the events of loss" (1994, 8). Marilyn May Lombardi finds in Bishop's elegiac works "the uncanny power to evoke the absent mother and the inexpressible pain of her loss" (1995, 19). Dissenting from the view that Bishop was grief-stricken by early trauma, Diana Fuss does acknowledge that Bishop's mother's death was formative in other ways, writing perceptively about "One Art" as "not a lament over loss but a desire for it" (2013). Most recently, Sandra Barry has argued that Bishop's mother "hovers over, haunts, and inhabits published poems" as well as peripheral works, proposing that "Gertrude was time. Gertrude was voice. Bishop learned about ebb and flow, now and then, sound and silence from her mother" (2014,108,109). Important as it is to investigate Bishop's poetic representations of the maternal, such approaches often downplay the ways her work is informed by literary models. Barry's sweeping statement, for example, renders invisible how Bishop's conception of time also is shaped by her readings of other poets' work--as an essay, published in her college years, entitled "Gerard Manley Hopkins: Notes on Timing in His Poetry" (1934) suggests. Attributing the development of Bishop's sensibility and aesthetic primarily to her mother (or her childhood, or her lesbianism, or her alcoholism) is symptomatic of a problematic separation of the lyric "I" from lyricism itself in many critical approaches to Bishop. In "Elizabeth Bishop's Impersonal Personal" Bonnie Costello contends that critics like Harrison have focused too much on the influence of real-life history in Bishop's poems, oversimplifying the complex influence on her work of literary history: "Bishop's critics have celebrated her subversive relationship to 'the Western tradition' rather than emphasizing the many ways in which that tradition, by no means unitary, might haunt her and shape her, or recognizing how the 'I' of her poems might emerge as a site of cross-identifications and cultural yearnings rather than as a coherent self" (2003, 335-56). Rather than viewing Bishop's poems as "cloaks" for personal experience, Costello encourages us to consider them as "masks" instead, "designed for symbolic expansion, and engagement with the 'generality' (to use Adorno's word) of language" (343). Costello's corrective position is especially compelling. But I wonder if it is nonetheless in danger of perpetuating the same separation of the lyric "I" from lyricism. Countering what she sees as the exclusion of tradition from the conversation about autobiography, Costello seeks to exclude autobiography from the conversation about tradition. Offering my own corrective to her corrective, I thus argue that Bishop's poetics produce "site[s] of cross-identification" among literary history, cultural pressure, and experience. "The Bight" is in this regard a particularly rich site for investigation. A canonical Bishop poem in which the maternal can be detected, "The Bight" has also formed the basis of significant critical discussion about Bishop's relationship with Charles Baudelaire and the symboliste aesthetic, but these two critical strands have taken too little account of one another. It is my contention that the maternal presence in "The Bight" is intimately connected to the poem's engagement not simply with Baudelaire but with the seven-hundred-year-old tradition of danse macabre that Baudelaire reimagined, and that exploring this connection will provide a corrective illustration of how Bishop's literary-historical engagement and her exploration of maternal themes coalesce into sophisticated literary forms that exploit a vast range of musical, tonal, and symbolic effects. …

ADAM C. BRADFORD, Communities of Death: Whitman, Poe, and the American Culture of Mourning. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2014. xiv + 248 pp.For those accustomed to the conventional literary wisdom that Walt Whitman's primary mentor was Ralph Waldo Emerson, Adam Bradford's Communities of Death may prove startling. Bradford puts forward the audacious thesis that instead of Emerson's Transcendentalist work, Poe's macabre work served to inspire Whitman's most ambitious poetic projects. Contending not only that Poe influenced Whitman, Bradford asserts that Poe was responsible for Whitman's most crucial achievements in both democratic and spiritual poetics; Whitman developed a democratic vision by drawing upon the importance of communal mourning, and a spiritual vision by drawing upon the material proximity of the deceased. Bradford states that Whitman "repeatedly testified to the oddly recuperative potential of Poe's Gothic and macabre literature and claimed that it played a central role in spurring him to produce the rather remarkably transcendent Leaves of Grass" (6). Central to this argument is the need to see both poets as their contemporaries did, specifically in terms of the cultural work of mourning.That we have largely failed to see the recuperative aspects of Poe's poems and stories in our time is due to our removal from and uneasiness with the nineteenth-century practices of prizing attachment, including bodily attachment, to the deceased. Early twentieth-century Freudian conceptions of grief work posited detachment from the dead as the way to reach a healthy reintegration of the self in mourning, but nineteenth-century conventions conceived of attachment as desirable because it signaled a healthy relationship with the dead, and could even extend the relationship into the afterlife. Antebellum mourning depended upon culturally sanctioned rituals that drew mourners into involvement with members of the community by way of the crucial rituals of making and exchanging material objects of mourning.Bradford's examination of this nineteenth-century material culture in terms of poetics is the most valuable of many astute contributions in Communities of Death. His examination will most likely be of interest to any historian of nineteenth-century literature that deals with representations of death and absence-in other words, a great deal of it. Antebellum materials of mourning were drawn from close contact with the dead, and included such objects as weavings made from the hair of the deceased, memorial quilts, mourning portraits, jewelry made from the deceased's effects, photography (of the corpse), and consolation poetry inscribed on urns, headstones, and the like. These items, perhaps distasteful to us, were hardly perceived as such during the period and, indeed, aided in the active remembering that might enable a survivor to be in the continued presence of the departed. The items connected family members, friends, and communities, strengthening and renewing social ties; not simply mementos, the items served as potent talismans, and were seen as salubrious in preventing separation from the departed for years, or even a lifetime.Bradford investigates the role of these funerary materials to show how Poe's audience read his work "with a sense of empathetic commiseration as opposed to shock and horror, making these poems into invaluable tools [for the] bereaved" (13). To immerse oneself in such mortuary details and reread poems like "Annabel Lee" and "The Raven" under Bradford's tutelage is to discover a different Poe from the one we may have thought we knew. The speakers of these and others of Poe's poems do not engage in morbid activities but rather perform accepted nineteenth-century rituals of mourning that allowed access to the bodies of the dead, expressing grief in what were seen as healthy and natural ways. Poe's readers were affected because they "approached the text with an understanding of grief that made allowance for these types of otherwise unconventional thoughts and behavior" (43). …

ResumoA imagem do cadáver humano em seus processos de decomposição post-mortem se tornou parte das manifestações culturais e artísticas no Ocidente a partir do surgimento dos temas macabros na Baixa Idade Média, em especial nas "Danças Macabras", entre outros. Verdadeira obsessão medieval, o corpo em putrefação reapareceria como objeto estético na literatura de horror do Romantismo, que se convencionou denominar "gótica". Dentre essa produção, destaca-se o chamado "roman-charogne", gênero que abusava da referência macabra, explorando as características do cadáver decomposto de maneira sem antecedentes. O artigo busca levantar esses exemplares e problematizar a presença do morto putrefato neles, que responderia a demandas específicas de suas épocas. AbstractThe image of the human corpse throughout its post-mortem decomposition has become part of the cultural and artistic demonstrations in the West, beginning with the appearance of the macabre themes in the Late Middle Ages, especially the "Dance of Death". A true obsession in the medieval times, the putrid body would reappear as an aesthetic object in the horror literature, also known as "gothic". The so called roman-charogne, literary style that abuses of macabre references, outstands within this production, exploring aspects of the decaying corpse as never seen before. This article aims to point out these examples, problematizing the presence of the rotten dead body that would answer specific demands of those times.

The persistent employment of excessive violence on the early modern English stage was studied by Renaissance scholarship for centuries in diverse but rather formal or historicist ways, and this critical focus received no new impetus until the corporal turn in critical theory after the 1980s. Before the poststructuralist, or, more precisely, the postsemiotic and corposemiotic investigations, critics tended to categorize bodily transgression as part of the general process of deterioration that lead to the decadence and all-enveloping perversity of the Stuart and Caroline stage, or they merely catalogued the metamorphoses of iconographic and emblematic elements of the memento mori, the ars moriendi, the contemptus mundi, the danse macabre or the exemplum horrendum traditions through the imagery of violence, mutilation and corporeal disintegration. The reception history of Shakespeare’s first tragedy exemplifies the general hostility towards extreme violence, an attitude which was established by the technologies of canon formation in the eighteenth and nineteenth century.

International audience; Focusing on Edgar Allan Poe and Roald Dahl's short-stories, this paper's main framework aims at demonstrating that although it may not seem initially obvious, the works of the two authors share not only one, but many characteristics. Before writing his famous children's fiction, Roald Dahl established his reputation as a writer of deathly short stories with unexpected twists that may recall Poe's Gothic tales. Therefore Dahl, who has never been considered part of the Neo-Gothic stream, has nevertheless incorporated Neo-Gothic elements in his work. The first part of this paper will focus on the Gothic genre of the two authors (and its characteristics) as it appears to be their common playground. In the second part of this study, the theme of the tortured body will be treated and will attempt to highlight the idea that the body, in Poe's and Dahl's works, stands for an externalization of the narrators' tortured minds.

Memory dominates modern Irish poetry and retrospection is often said to govern Irish culture more generally. The eighteenth century is a particularly vexed memorial presence in Eavan Boland’s work, its representation characterized by fracture, separation, and loss. Medbh McGuckian’s collection Shelmalier celebrates and mourns the 1798 rebellion as a radical moment called to mind through a baroque and sometimes macabre imaginary of relics, bodies, and textual fragments.

From revenant legends to the regulation of burial space; from martyrologies to accounts of murder; and from the danse macabre to funerals both lavish and simple, this volume examines how communities dealt with their dead as continual, albeit non-living members.

Pablo Larrain’s cinema has broken with the nostalgic and traumatic approach that once prevailed in post-authoritarian Chilean film. Though affiliated to social tradition by the New Latin American Cinema, this intervention breaks with sensibilities first proposed in the 1960s, and which have persisted since then. Larrain’s output is constructed through an incorporation of a creative subjectivity consolidated under the rubrics of state terrorism and the neoliberal model. This rupture is then enacted through cynicism, by focusing on characters inhabiting interstitial geographical or psychological landscapes, and by imitating genres rooted in the commercial culture industry. It is with respect to Larrain’s films’ self-positioning as both social critique and aesthetic rupture that we may refer to them as comprising a macabre baroque cinema.

From revenant legends to the regulation of burial space; from martyrologies to accounts of murder; and from the danse macabre to funerals both lavish and simple, this volume examines how communities dealt with their dead as continual, albeit non-living members.

Supernatural Horror in Literature distinguishes between psychological and cosmic horror, with the former turned inward to the darkest recesses of the human mind and the latter focused on external horrors transcending human understanding and control. Lovecraft’s framework has proven indispensable in the critical consideration of horror in literature and popular culture and has been frequently negotiated by authors and critics alike, including by Stephen King’s 1981 critical consideration of the horror genre, Danse Macabre. King uses Lovecraft’s framework as a foundation for exploring contemporary horror. This chapter puts Lovecraft’s and King’s frameworks of horror in conversation with one another, demonstrating the connections between and departures of King’s work from Lovecraft’s theory and highlighting the ways in which supernatural horror is both classically defined and, simultaneously, in constant flux.

In the first of two chapters considering the legacy of the criminal corpse we examine what happened to the physical remains of criminal bodies—partial and fragmented as they were by the end of their post-mortem punishments. Very few remains received any sort of burial, but a number were put to use as mounted skeletons or anatomical preparations for educational purposes. Other remains were curated as macabre souvenirs. Other uses included modelling for artists, experimental subjects for galvanism or phrenology; and the medicinal use of body parts in both orthodox and folk medicine.

From revenant legends to the regulation of burial space; from martyrologies to accounts of murder; and from the danse macabre to funerals both lavish and simple, this volume examines how communities dealt with their dead as continual, albeit non-living members.

A few years after I finished a Ph.D. in anthropology, my World Wildlife Fund (WWF) colleague Yury Darman and I were in the Russian Far East, checking motion-sensing camera traps installed on a forested hillside. We were collecting data to estimate the population of the endangered Siberian tiger and the even more endangered Amur leopard. When we reached the summit, Yury pointed. “We stand here in Russia,” he said on that day in 2005. “One mile that way? China. One mile this way? North Korea. Our poor cats are the most diplomatically challenged animals in the world.” Thus began my career not only as a conservation scientist, but also as a cultural translator. ![Figure][1] ILLUSTRATION: ROBERT NEUBECKER > “We must be able to talk to others with very different perspectives.” Yury went on to stress that these felines could come back from the brink of extinction if they had large blocks of forest with abundant prey. That, he emphasized, depended on the actions and influence of Russian timber companies, Chinese bureaucrats, U.S. consumers, and multinational corporations, to name just a few players. Ultimately, the animals' survival hinged on translation among those groups, with their vastly different perspectives and motives. Identifying the right people and helping them find a common future that included big cats was exhilarating—almost as much as spying one of these endangered animals in the wild. Over my 10 years with WWF, I sought that thin wedge of overlap on a complicated Venn diagram of groups that too often spoke right past one another. I would spend a day with a Walmart executive exploring what would persuade the company to change its strategy for procuring timber products, another with an undercover agent looking at patterns of illegal logging, and another with an architect eager to feature sustainably managed timber in a high-profile project. I learned that good conservation science needs to include equal parts hard data and human empathy. For our big cats to survive, all the players need not only to understand one another's language, but also to put themselves in one another's shoes. More recently, I was reminded that translation is a critical skill regardless of discipline or position. About a year after I became a college president, a 50-ton sperm whale died near our waterfront campus. Researchers at the college dragged the whale to shore so that students, staff, and faculty members could perform a necropsy—valuable both as a learning experience for our students and as a way to determine whether entanglement with fishing gear is killing whales, a subject of heated debate in coastal communities. We then needed to compost the animal underground for 18 months to reduce it to a skeleton, which would offer further educational opportunities. I decided the college's farm would be the perfect place for that macabre burial, but I failed to anticipate the perceptions and concerns of the 17 households abutting the farm and didn't do the necessary translation before we announced the plan. The neighbors weren't at all excited about the prospect of a gigantic whale decomposing near their pastoral backyards. They imagined horrible odors, pest invasions, and lowered property values. So, I was left with a public relations nightmare and a flensed whale, rapidly rotting in the August heat. We composted the animal elsewhere, but it took years to rebuild those important relationships with our neighbors. And I quickly learned that translating is as important for running a college as it is for conserving large predators. As a college president, I aim to inspire interest in translation not as a peripheral nicety, but as a core competency among our students. Traditional academic disciplines, especially in the sciences, have a long history of being siloed. But if scientists are going to help solve complex problems together, we must be able to talk to others with very different perspectives. Seeing students develop these translation skills early on in their academic careers gives me hope for humanity, and for the planet. [1]: pending:yes

The Gothic era dealt in fear and the unknown, with early nineteenth century Gothic fiction being characterized by the macabre and influenced by the Enlightenment. The scientific and industrial revolutions of the eighteenth century brought forth advanced scientific theories and modes of reasoning, which found their way into the narratives of Gothic works. The public’s fascination with horror and the morbid extended from the Gothic era into the Victorian Gothic era, and tales of mystery and crime became intertwined with death and the monstrous. Literature of the Victorian Gothic era continued to explore the fears and anxieties of society, and was supplemented by knowledge obtained through developments in science, criminology and the criminal justice system. Elements of Gothic horror, scientific reasoning and crime are presented throughout various works of Edgar Allan Poe and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Such works include Poe’s stories of ratiocination in both his tales of horror and mystery; Poe’s stories featuring the detective C. Auguste Dupin; Doyle’s tales of mystery and the supernatural; and a selection of Doyle’s adventures of Sherlock Holmes. In these works by Poe and Doyle, the investigative prowess of the narrator, along with the methods of observation and interpretation, are utilized to explain the macabre and unknown. This essay introduces the reader to specific techniques of reasoning and the utilization of scientific methodology, specifically observation, to look beyond madness and mystery to arrive at logical conclusions for observed phenomena. The purpose of this essay is three-fold: first, to correlate the works of Poe and Doyle to the prevailing discourse of the nineteenth century, considering advances in epistemology, criminology and criminal investigations; second, to draw attention to the role of ratiocination and various forms of reasoning in solving crimes and the resolution of the fear of death and monster through the works of Poe and Doyle; third, to evaluate Poe and Doyle’s ideas regarding the police, crime solving and the intersection of science and crime as expressed through their stories.

This paper explores the identity anxieties evident with Roam Polanski’s 1976 film The Tenant. From psychoanalytical to gender perspectives this paper decodes Polanski’s film and argues that this work demonstrates a sense of identity that it is associated with one’s physicality. From clothing, demeanour and physiology and even to “teeth” this film is one which demonstrates the gradual degradation of its protagonist’s existential identity through his own physical change. Focussing on cross-dressing and exploring the controversial consideration of clothing as gendered, this paper explores how one man’s change in to “women’s” clothing leads to his eventual death. There are questions of nationality, border crossing and of course those of gender which all accumulate in this author’s reading of The Tenant’s powerful and menacingly macabre message.

The winner of this year's prize is Frances Leviston's "Mothers and Marimbas in 'The Bight': Bishop's Danse Macabre!' The judge is Brian McHale, Arts and Humanities Distinguished Professor of English at the Ohio State University. His most recent books are The Cambridge Introduction to Postmodernism (2015) and The Routledge Companion to Experimental Literature, edited with Joe Bray and Alison Gibbon (2012). A cofounder of Ohio States Project Narrative, which he directed in 2012--14, he is also a founding member and former president of the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present (ASAP). He is currently coediting with Len Platt The Cambridge History of Postmodern Literature. Professor McHale writes: One convention of this sort of citation is to protest the virtual impossibility of selecting a "best" paper from among several excellent nominees--and I have no intention of breaking with tradition. I unreservedly admired all the nominated papers; I was edified and enlightened by all of them; they all changed the way I will henceforth read and think about the authors and texts they explored. They were all superior examples of their respective kinds of critical writing, but they were all different in kind, which seemed to put me in the uncomfortable position of having to decide which kind of critical writing I valued most. Which do I prefer, apples or oranges? So (to mix metaphors) I punted. Let me recommend to you "Mothers and Marimbas in 'The Bight': Bishop's Danse Macabre," which excellently exemplifies not a superior kind of critical writing so much as a basic one: close reading. Close reading is still one of the skills that we hope our students will master; we coach them in it, and we expect them to practice it. We practice it ourselves in our own critical writing and appreciate it in our peers' practice. Even if our project is a theoretical one, or historicist or contextualist or political in any of a number of ways, we still depend more often than not on close readings of texts. Even if close reading is the ladder that we kick away once we've climbed up it, we still climb it. "Mothers and Marimbas" undertakes an exemplary close reading of Elizabeth Bishop's poem "The Bight." It attends scrupulously to details of sound and sense; it excavates wordplay and etymologies; it brings to bear wide literary-historical and cultural learning, and justifies the relevance of that learning to Bishop and her text; it makes judicious and resourceful use of Bishop's letters, her discarded drafts, and the facts of her biography to illuminate the text at hand. It does, in other words, exactly what we have in mind when we characterize a piece of critical writing as a close reading, and it does so with tact and imagination. Which is not to say that its horizons are limited to explicating the thirty-six lines of Bishop's text. Rather, "Mothers and Marimbas" joins the ongoing scholarly conversation about Bishop, in particular the part of that conversation having to do with the relationship between Bishop's writing and her difficult and troubled life. Precisely because her poetry often seems deliberately reticent--or maybe because it aspires to reticence--it has prompted a great deal of biographical and symptomatic reading that seeks to restore the effaced contexts of her childhood displacement, her sexuality, her alcoholism, and most relevantly for this poem, the loss of her mother. Without at all denying the somewhat cryptically biographical dimension of "The Bight," "Mothers and Marimbas" reminds us that private expression is mediated here (as everywhere in Bishop) by her deep engagement with her poetic precursors and the cultural traditions all around her. The poet sometimes pretended that "The Bight" was "plain description," but it was far from "plain" anything, and there was manifestly a lot at stake in it for her. …

This reading situates Robert Browning's “A Forgiveness” in the context of popular Victorian lyrics in order to draw attention to features of the popular texts that are tellingly absent from or ironized within Browning's poem. I trace the “grammar of forgiveness” in the popular texts, outlining the often explicitly theological framework that guides how the language of forgiveness is used and to what intended effect. This linguistic exploration also demonstrates that Browning's title – now a curious phrase – was not unusual at the time; it was often employed in the period to make distinctions between human and divine forgiveness. The study juxtaposes the “grammar of forgiveness” found in the popular texts with that of Browning's poem, revealing that the speaker is, in his own macabre fashion, grammatically inventive, fusing forgiveness and retribution in his deadly response to his wife's feigned infidelity and the murderous visit to confession in which he reports how his wife died. Yet the speaker's bleak presentation of forgiveness, I argue, should not be read uncritically as expressing Browning's ethical perspective. Instead, I observe that the poem's form – the dramatic monologue – presents the reader with the opportunity for critique of the speaker's project, inviting reflection on the speaker's form of forgiveness rather than demanding its practice in the manner characteristic of the popular lyrics.

I hold it probable-- With something changeless at the heart of me To know me by, some nucleus that's myself: Accretions did it wrong? Away with them-- You soon shall see the use of fire! Till when, All that was, is; and must forever be. Nor is it in me to unhate my hates,-- --Count Guido Franceschini (1) When Browning began writing The Ring and the Book in late 1864, his critical reputation was still unsteady. Criticized for his obscurity, dense allusiveness, and supposed lack of lyricism, he was often described as a poet of "weighty sense" who "neglects the form," (2) a supreme analyst and vivisectionist whose psychological insight precluded aesthetic merit. His self-professed interest in "morbid cases of the soul" (3) drew accusations that the sordid or repugnant held for him a macabre fascination. To many of his contemporaries, Browning's dramatis personae were not sympathetic characters. Now, of course, with the work of Langbaum and successive critics (4) behind us, we realize that the tension between sympathy and moral judgment is part of the aesthetic of the dramatic monologue, a dialectic that Browning exploited to the fullest. For Victorian readers, however, the unsympathetic--indeed, grotesque--nature of Browning's speakers proved, at least initially, a significant hindrance. Browning became "increasingly angry about his still-equivocal critical reputation, and began attacking his reviewers in print.'"' and in 1864 channelled much of this burgeoning rage into his immense project, The Ring and the Book. (6) Numerous critics have noted Browning's famous invocation to "lyric Love," the spirit of EBB (1.1391). Less frequently cited, however, is the preceding apostrophe, "Such, British Public, ye who like me not, / (God love you!)--whom I yet have laboured for, / Perchance more careful whoso runs may read / Than erst when all, it seemed, could read who ran" (1.1379-82). Thus writes the Poet-speaker, charging the unseeing, judgemental "British Public" that neither likes nor understands him. Anger is the prevailing tone here: Browning's anger against his critics, the public for whom he "labours," and the uncomprehending readers who he mistakenly thought would understand his verse. Is it coincidence, then, that he chooses to frame a poem about a murder-trial with this invocation? Browning, the object of critical antagonism, is accused of violating accepted poetic practice and on trial, defending himself and his art before the British Public. In these circumstances, he makes use of an intelligent anger: anger as a rhetorical device, tool of revenge, creative force, and, ultimately, instrument of self-definition. In this, he bears similarities to the hero-villain of the piece, Guido Franceschini, also on trial. But the poet's anger refracts throughout The Ring and the Book, "deformed, transformed, reformed, informed, conformed" (XI.2063) in monologues offering a prismatic view of this emotive and cognitive force. Like so many lenses, Guido, Pompilia, Caponsacchi and the Roman public in the shapes of Half-Rome, Other Half-Rome, and Tertium Quid, produce different images of anger. While it is "wolf-nature[d]" Guido (XI.2318) whose rage has received most attention, Browning's other characters, Pompilia especially, contribute to his interpretation of anger in its many, colourful forms. Recognizing anger as one of its design elements opens up a fresh approach to The Ring and the Book which connects it with other works by Browning and other aspects of his poetics. The Ring and the Book exaggerates qualities for which Browning was earlier attacked. He was accused of obscurity, and decided to write on a virtually unknown Renaissance murder-trial; his language was considered dense and unpoetic, so he filled his epic with difficult legal terminology, anatomical descriptions, (7) and inaccessible Latin; his characters were deemed unsympathetic and monstrous, and in response he formed, in the person of Count Guido, a character so filled with hatred that he would eventually become the ultimate villain of Browning villains, "an anthology of Browning's other haters. …

Mozart-Jahrbuch 2011. Edited by Ulrich Leisinger and Johanna Senigl, Akademie fur Mozart-Forschung. Kassel: Barenreiter, 2012. [x, 297 p. ISBN 9783761823224. i72.] Music examples, illustrations, bibliography.As the editors explain in their preface, many of the sixteen contributions to the Mozart-Jahrbuch for 2011 treat Mozart's secular vocal music or the subject of Mozart and romanticism. Other essays present new discoveries, musical or otherwise, and reinterpret biographical information about important people in Mozart's life. An interesting aggregate of the types of research being conducted mainly in Europe and largely in German-only two contributions are in English-the volume is a useful way for English-speaking scholars to keep abreast of the new developments in continental research, which seem to be moving in more new directions than in previous years. Since it is impossible here to do justice to all of the authors' essays, each of which is interesting in its own right, I will simply point out what, to me, were notable aspects of some of them.In his " 'Meisterwerke ohne Hintergrund? Uberlegungen zur historischen Kon - textuali sierung von Mozarts Wiener Opere buffe," Michele Calella critiques the tendency of German-speaking Mozart scholars to see Mozart's oeuvre as consisting of masterworks that are divorced from their cultural context and produced by a "German" genius who was uninfluenced by Italian and French musical and theatrical practices. This nineteenth-century habit persists today, as does the practice of continually referring to scholarship of that time in favor of revisiting primary source material. The language gap is a further problem: Callela discusses, for example, how Mary Hunter's important monograph on opera buffa, standard reading on the subject in Englishlanguage scholarship, is rarely mentioned in recent German scholarship.Fortunately, Calella's criticism does not necessarily apply to the volume at hand. Josef-Horst Lederer's "Zur musikalischen Uberlieferung der ersten Auftrittsszene des Bassa Selim in Mozarts Die Entfuhrung aus dem Serail," for example, refers to scholarship written in several languages and takes both primary sources and contemporary Turkish-themed operas into account. Lederer explains that musicians who were to play the Turkish march, which is missing from the score, were listed on the payroll but never took part in a performance. His theory is that they may have fallen victim to the flu epidemic that reached its high point around the premiere of the opera. Perhaps less trustworthy is the account he gives by a doctor, writing in 1782, which claims that the epidemic killed almost two-thirds of Vienna's residents.In his essay "Mozart's Requiem and Nineteenth-Century Fiction," Simon Keefe examines reception history particularly through non-musical publications and addresses the romantic veneer that accompanies the Requiem to this day. A fascination with the macabre and the placement of stories about the Requiem in collections of ghost stories intensified the greatly exag gerated connection between the piece and the composer's own death. But Keefe shows that these are part of a nineteenth-century legacy that, much like Sussmayr's completion of the piece, does Mozart a service by popularizing his music. Paulino Capdepon also deals with reception history in his "Manuel Garcia und die Rezeption der Opern Mozarts," and shows how influential the Spanish tenor was in bringing Mozart's operas to audiences especially in Madrid, in London, and in Paris.As part of her larger project on Mozart's Czech copyists, Milada Jonasova continues her impressive work with primary sources in her "Prager Abschriften von Mozart's Kompositionen als Druck vorlagen," by discussing the correspondence between members of important publishing houses in Leipzig and various musicians and music lovers. Among other discoveries, she sheds light on the relationship between Mozart's first biographer, Franz Xaver Niemetschek, and Constanze Mozart. …

This three-part essay addresses the monstrous-feminine in Lybeaus Desconus, a Middle English romance extant in six manuscript versions. Part 1 foregrounds variations on the fierce kiss (fier basier) that signals a change in narratives of the 'Fair Unknown.' Part 2 addresses Lybeaus' status as an illegitimate son of Gawain and his reintegration into courtly society. Part 3 examines the means by which the monstrous-feminine plays a role in the transformation of a source text into two English versions in a complex process of adaptation. (ES)Lybeaus Desconus is a tale about a mysterious outsider-the Fair Unknown-who comes to King Arthur's court to prove himself worthy of inclusion.1 Like Perceval, this would-be knight is raised in the wilderness by his mother; his status as Sir Gawain's illegitimate son is unknown even to himself. When Arthur asks him to state his name publicly, the youth announces the only name he knows-Bewfiz (Beautiful Son)-a term of endearment identifying him exclusively as his mother's child. Such a name proves troublesome in a realm predicated upon androcentric codes of conduct and 'proper' names. Thus in a gesture that overrides the mother's dominion over her son, the youth is dubbed 'Lybeaus Desconus' and provisionally enfolded into a signifying system until he gains full recognition by the chivalric community. This name is akin to 'Bewfiz' in its recognition of the boy's good looks, and the renamed young knight-called 'child' for much of the narrative-is provisionally enfolded into a signifying system until he gains full recognition by the chivalric community. In the legitimizing world of the Arthurian court to which Lybeaus Desconus is only tangentially related, the illegitimate son of Gawain stands in a precarious position between kinship and disenfranchisement.Once provided with a legitimate name by the king, Lybeaus is offered an opportunity to forge a reputation for himself when he is assigned a mission to rescue the lady of Synadoun who has been transformed into a dragon by two malevolent necromancers. When Lybeaus arrives at the lady's castle in the macabre city of Synadoun, believed to be located somewhere in North Wales, he enters the enchanted hall and is immediately overtaken by such apprehension and fear that he 'swelt for swete' (sweltered for sweat [Lambeth, line 2076]). Such a physiological response, rarely acknowledged in medieval romance even in a knight's preparation for battle, presages events to come when suddenly, a 'worme...with a womanes face,' (Lambeth, lines 2067-68) emerges from a window of the illumined hall to confront the fearful knight. Literally stopped in his tracks by the sight of the hybrid dragon-lady looming before him, Lybeaus feels his heart begin to pound so forcefully that he thinks it will burst ('So sore he was agaste/Hym thought his herte tobraste' [Lambeth, lines 2079-80]). Then, without warning, he becomes the target of a stunning act of intimacy as the creature grabs him around the neck and delivers a fearsome kiss: 'The worme with mouth him kyste/And clypped aboute the swyre' (Lambeth, lines 2077-84).The aggressive and shocking dragon-woman who attacks the novitiate knight and produces this visceral response in him enacts what film critic Barbara Creed calls the 'monstrous-feminine,' a concept she defines as any representation of a daunting mode of female sexuality eliciting fear in the men who encounter it.2 For Creed, female monsters take many forms and assume many guises; some have more to do with reproduction and motherhood- the archaic mother, woman as monstrous womb, woman as witch, for instance- while others address matters of sexual desire-the femme castratrice and the vagina dentata. In its ability to destabilize normative ontological categories, the monstrous-feminine is a paradoxical figure of resistance and attraction, desire and revulsion, aggression and submission, the beautiful and the hideous, the familiar and the unfamiliar. …

ANYONE who has read or taught Dante Alighieri's Divina Commedia in translation has been faced with the vital question of which edition to select. This choice is not made easy by the great abundance of English editions of one of literature's most translated texts. Although the profusion of translations, nearly all completed within the last two centuries, (1) pales in comparison with the 700-year history of Italian editions, the texts vary tremendously in structure, style, and accuracy. Such differences reflect not only historical shifts of translation methodology and theory over time but also the individual translator's understanding and interpretation of the original text. The choices that the translator makes can have a profound effect on the experience of the casual reader as well as the more committed student or scholar. The most dramatic example of the translator's influence over Dante's text is found, perhaps not surprisingly, in the famously controversial Inferno XXXIII, line 75: "Poscia, piu che 'l dolor, pote 'l digiuno." In this article, I examine a wide range of English renderings of this line and ponder their implications. (2) The resulting exploration underscores the power of the translated word and its influence over not only the interpretation of the original text but also, perhaps more significantly, our ability to confront uncomfortable cultural realities. The notoriously ambiguous line 75 concludes Count Ugolino's account of his horrific death in what later became known as Pisa's "Torre della fame." In Dante's Hell, Ugolino is bound by ice together with Archbishop Ruggieri, the man who had betrayed and then imprisoned him, causing his death. Their bodies are frozen below the surface, merged into one rigid form, with heads exposed and Ugolino's teeth eternally gnawing at the skull and nape of his captor's neck. Ostensibly, Ugolino inhabits this circle of Hell for the sin of treachery, but his tale does not include the narration of this offense. Instead, Ugolino describes how he was locked into the tower with his sons and grandsons--who are represented by Dante as children although, historically, they were adults at the time--and eventually left to starve to death. This is one of the most memorable passages to any reader of the Inferno, with the suffering of the children vividly narrated and then followed by their macabre offer: telling their father to unmake them by stripping them of their flesh, to eat them in order to relieve his own pain. Ugolino did not act on their proposition, and one by one the children died of starvation. His condemned spirit relates how he alone remained, crawling over the bodies of his descendants in despair, concluding his tale with the verse, "Poscia, piu che 'l dolor, pote 'l digiuno." After uttering these words, Ugolino buries his teeth once again into his adversary's skull. What exactly does Ugolino mean by these words? Did Dante intend to say that although grief did not kill him, hunger did so? Or was he implying that hunger overcame the reticence of grief and sorrow, driving Ugolino to eat the flesh of his deceased offspring before he, himself, died? The controversy has raged for centuries, with strong and sometimes heated arguments on both sides. (3) I will not attempt to give a definitive answer to this much-debated issue; my interest lies instead in the question of what the translators believed when they translated and/or commented upon the line and how their opinions may or may not be reflected in the end result. The very first English text based on the Divina Commedia was, fittingly, Chaucer's paraphrase of the Ugolino story in the "Monk's Tale," dating from c. 1370. Ugolino's episode later became the most widely translated of the Commedia (Crisafulli 12), and he reappeared as a popular figure in many loosely translated fragments from the 18th century, reflecting the era's fascination with the macabre (De Sua 9). (4) Following the first translation of the entire Commedia by Henry Boyd in 1785, the floodgates opened and one translation followed another, among them the first American version, published by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in 1867. …

Consider this a vade mecum: an invitation to “walk with me” through more or less uncanny terrains of worlds in the making in search, of(f) course, of monsters. The search will be delving into the areas of “creepypasta:” pieces of cursed prose and pictures that circulate online, waiting to contaminate and possess the next reader. Using a theoretical framework of posthuman and feminist theory, not least the work done by Jacques Derrida and Donna Haraway, this vade mecum asks what it might mean to engage ethically with that which is not supposed to exist, but which haunts us nonetheless. In other words: what does it mean to move, live and engage with spectres in digital times?

Este ensayo presenta el caso del escritor alemán Hanns Heinz Ewers (1871-1943), quien, antes de la Primera Guerra Mundial, fue al autor más traducido de su país.Podemos encontrar en su prosa variados ingredientes (lo macabro, lo gótico, lo fantástico, lo cruel), que lo tornaron en un gran representante de la oscura imaginacióngermánica, que va del romanticismo al siglo XX. Por desgracia, su tardía participación en el movimiento nazi afectó su reputación (como pasó también con Jünger, en Alemania, o con Céline, en Francia), pero ahora es tiempo de revisar su obra literaria, más allá de su pensamiento político, que cambió del cosmopolitismo de las primeras décadas del siglo XX (cuando alcanzó su mayor fama) alnacionalismo de sus últimos años. Su participación en el cine expresionista alemán con El estudiante de Praga (1914) y algunas adaptaciones de sus historias (por ejemplo, Mandrágora) fue otro aspecto importante de su carrera.

At the end of his treatise "On the Priesthood" (De Sacerdotio) St. John Chrysostom describes the battle between Good and Evil in terms which irresistibly remind the reader of Lucan’s macabre humor in describing the battles of the Civil War. Chrysostom knew no Latin. The resemblance between him and Lucan springs from the fact that both men, who were in any case to die by violence, lived in liminal worlds. Under such pressures, and not because of any topical extravagance, their imaginations resorted to similar stylistic modes.

Swedish director Roy Andersson's work, as exemplified by his masterpiece Songs from the Second Floor (2000), is stylistically marked by the use of a static camera that captures a slowly accumulating tableaux of choreographed action. Each shot satirically dissects the deadening insular monotony central to the functioning of the European city and the identity of its typical denizens. Urban spaces and the unkempt dereliction of their outskirts become the settings for macabre deadpan visual allegories of malaise and despair. The unmoving framing derives cinematically from Parajanov but also directly links the image to European traditions of intricately crafted paintings, such as those of Bruegel. Fruitful and surprising connections can be drawn between the composition, structure, thematic materials and viewing strategies involved in viewing both Andersson's and Bruegel's work, despite the disparity between their media and their historical moments. Combining European art cinema techniques traditionally...

In this anatomical study of a single monster and its birth, the questions as to its form and function are raised. Monsters do not emerge out of a cultural void; they have a literary and cultural heritage. Yet when they are newly conceived, the need to construct a background becomes imperative. Since Slender Man is a prohibitive monster, but without a clear explanation as to what lines may or may not be crossed, the arbitrariness of his actions and characteristics offered a variety of possible backgrounds. The first narratives to emerge were linked to Norse and Native American mythology and medieval art (the danse macabre). Despite the culturally diverse character of the Internet, the folkloric and mythic sources used to form a social background for Slender Man were typical of the Western tradition. In terms of legend making and oral tradition, social networks have become a focal point of sharing traditional folklore and myth patterns. The shift from oral storytelling to the Internet forms of writing, blogging, and videotaping is intriguing because it shows no difference in dynamic. The creation of Slender Man demonstrates that legend making and telling—even without the direct oral link—obeys the same rules of performativity, critique, embellishment, and progression as it does in the oral telling of a story. The audience and the primary story creator share the legend as a performance to stage their ideas of reality and normative social expectations within a construct of bizarre and preternatural circumstances.

One of the primary visual representations of the danse macabre, as well as an accompanying poetic text, may be found in a book printed in Paris by Guyot Marchant in 1485, based on the frescoes and inscription painted on the inner wall of the Cemetery of the Innocents. The metaphor of the mirror (presented in the preface of this 1486 edition), is critical to understanding the didactic intent of the danse macabre. Beyond the obvious mirror effects—the viewer/reader finding himself reflected in one of the secular or ecclesiastical figures of the social hierarchy represented by the dance, and also each living figure finding himself grotesquely mirrored by his corpse-partner—there is other, more subtle mirror play to be found within the text, and, occasionally, a mirror relationship between the image and the corresponding text. This article explores various manifestations of the mirror in Marchant’s Danse macabre, incorporating a few selected images from Marchant’s book.

This chapter focuses on the prominence of the figure of the skeleton in entertainment in the 1890s. Skeletons are a particularly common sight in early cinema, especially in the trick films of Georges Melies, beginning with The Vanishing Lady (1896). This visibility can be explained on the one hand as a vestige of danse macabre traditions stretching back to the Middle Ages, and on the other as an offshoot of the X-ray’s contemporaneous popularity. The chapter explains how both of these causes factored into the eroticization of the female skeleton in early cinema and the late Victorian cult of dead and dying women, and explores its latter-day echoes.

Building on Elizabethan dramatic conventions and religious debates about ghosts, Hamlet employs linguistic and dramatic means to chill its audience. Audio-visual means, along with the manner of entrances and exits, are used in order to horrify the audience. These create a fluctuation between belief and disbelief towards the macabre elements in the play, which only heightens the fear in the audience. Thus, through these elements, gothic catharsis is achieved, which creates cathartic horror that generates fear in the audience. The overall sensory experience in the Early Modern amphitheatre in which the play was enacted had a great effect in achieving this form of catharsis. Therefore, this article aims to illustrate how Elizabethan playhouse experience affected audience reaction towards macabre elements in Hamlet in order to trigger gothic catharsis.

Tire companies consistently distinguished themselves by preying upon fears of catastrophe. Ads regularly referred to flat tires and blowouts, and even more surprisingly, alluded to people being maimed and killed. No other companies so directly linked their products to the dangers inherent in traveling by car. The target for these ads was generally men, even when they appeared in women’s magazines, with the industry expectation that men were the principal decision makers and purchasers of this type of car component.

Canonization or the lack thereof—the ongoing arrivals and departures of those works and/or authors, which in some ambiguous manner are collectively deemed unique, representative, or inherently lasting—remains a slippery proposition as various political, aesthetic, and theoretical movements (themselves doomed to finite relevance) vie to push up or cast down their chosen literary champions and ne’er-do-wells. Canonization in southern literature is no exception, privy to its own “literary stock market”—as George Garrett once labeled it—in which works and authors break into and tumble out of anthologies, literary histories, critical studies, and course syllabi with the passing of the decades. By its very nature canonization invites many largely baseless abstractions and subjectivities, which in part is what makes the relative concreteness of John soward Bayne’s Gravely Concerned: Southern Writers’ Graves a refreshing book to read. Interpretation is mostly left to others as Bayne chronologically provides brief summaries and engaging photographs of 157 regional literary graves. Yet the factuality of his undertaking does not entirely spare Bayne the specter of canonization—of inclusion and exclusion. since there exists no definitive universal measure by which to defend his choices, Bayne perhaps may be excused for sidestepping the quandary: “the selection is based on the authors’ popular or critical reputations and the appeal and accessibility of their gravesites. some may dispute whether these subjects were sufficiently southern, and whether they were truly writers, but this is certain: they’re all dead.” With regard to Bayne’s final item of qualification no counterargument may arise. While perhaps overly macabre if perused in one sitting, his book makes for a useful work of reference; and, as ron rash notes in his blurb, it is “also uplifting in its ability to bring the dead back into the light of the living.” daniel Cross turner’s critical study of modernist and contemporary southern poetry, Southern Crossings, echoes symbolically the factuality of Bayne’s