Search

Chris Priestley’s 2011 novel, Mister Creecher, promises to show ‘the making of a monster ...’ Set in 1818, the novel is a metafictional rewriting of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), imagining the monster’s journey as he tracks his creator to Scotland. In this version, the monster is aided by London pickpocket, Billy, whose provenance, the early novels of Charles Dickens, suggests further intertexts for this contemporary novel. It is Billy, rather than the eponymous ‘Creecher’, who is the novel’s protagonist: a sentimentalized, suffering Dickensian child, whose narrative is reconfigured through encounters with Shelley’s gothic novel and a range of other intertexts. Through Billy, Mister Creecher (2011) re-imagines Dickens’ children and the Dickensian bildungsroman, reconfiguring the positions of villain and innocent. Neo-Victorian texts have been characterized by a doubled relationship to their intertexts, a relationship that is parasitic on the one hand, revisiting the traumas of a past reconstructed as barbaric, and redemptive on the other hand, since these reconstructions are usually aimed at a revisionist critique. In the case of Mister Creecher (2011) the parasitic relationship of contemporary metafiction to past gothic and Victorian works is a part of the novel’s active intertextual fabric. This is a novel that explores how intertextuality itself functions as a corrupting parasite, problematizing and infecting any future encounter with back-grounded works. The introduction of Shelley’s creation into Dickens’ landscape is a wilfully contradictory gesture. On one hand, the doubling of Billy with Shelley’s monster provides a reverse bildungsroman, an account of villainy as social rather than simply essential or sensational, with reference to notions of family and childhood relevant in the contemporary moment. On the other hand, the monster’s invasion of Dickensian London is an aggressive act of gothic contagion or colonization, one akin to that imagined by Fran

This article uses readings of the abject body and writing as supplement in Helen Oyeyemi’s novel, The Icarus Girl (2005) to argue against a critical trend that reads the postcolonial Bildungsroman as promising a positively transformed postcolonial identity. Through our reading of Oyeyemi’s novel, we suggest that locating the debates and tropes conventionally mobilized within postcolonial gothic in the former colonial centre complicates subject formations and constructions of alterity. The Icarus Girl weaves together a Western literary tradition of gothic with the postcolonial Bildungsroman and we suggest that the interaction of these forms produces a reading focused on the abject, both in terms of physical abjection mapped onto bodies and places, and in the way writing functions as abject supplement. When bodies, borders, and writing disintegrate, the reading of the novel becomes a difficult process, one not easily co-opted into a critical discourse that tends to value a psycho-symbolic reading of the postcolonial gothic Bildungsroman and to promise a positively transformed postcolonial identity. Accordingly, we argue that The Icarus Girl is unable to find comforting resolutions, disrupt oppositional structures, and create a utopian hybrid space or to bring about a unified sense of self, meaning that it resists a redemptive or cathartic ending. We draw upon Kristeva’s theories of the abject and Derrida’s notion of the supplement in order to establish how Oyeyemi’s novel resists the construction of a stable identity through its emphasis upon expulsion and disintegration. Unlike the majority of criticism on postcolonial gothic, which focuses on texts emanating from formerly colonized countries, this article considers what happens to postcolonial gothic when it is written within and about the former colonial centre. In The Icarus Girl the repercussions of the colonial period are experienced in the present day through experiences of racism, dislocation, and alienation w

The witch child manifests at the intersection of history and fiction, revealing as uncanny our desire to know a ‘real’ child. This paper explores representations of the witch child in BBC 4’s 2011 documentary, The Pendle Witch Child, and Joseph Delaney’s fantasy fiction series, The Wardstone Chronicles, to argue that recent representations of witch children that attempt to ‘recuperate’ the image of the innocent-child-as-victim are destabilised by the uncanny presence of a witch child who resists this recuperation. The desire to know a real, historical child operates within a binary construction, oscillating between desire for the Romantic innocent and fear of the self-possessed child of gothic horror. The uncanny witch child that emerges from this conflict is finally embraced only by Fantasy, whose disregard for historical truth and veracity allows space for the construction of childhood to inhabit a multiplicity of possibilities.