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Copyright of Revista Laboratorio is the property of Universidad Diego Portales and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The article discusses the intersection of found footage horror and documentary cinema, highlighting their shared esthetic features and narrative effects. Topic include examines irony and sarcasm in the preface and opening paragraphs, explores the symbolic significance of characters, and analyzes how the evidentiary effect is exploited to heighten suspense in the genre.

This article discusses the enduring popularity and academic acclaim of Jane Austen's novels. It highlights the reasons why her works are highly regarded, including interesting characters, witty prose, and engaging plots. Austen's novels are seen as ahead of their time, remaining accessible and fresh while other 19th-century novels became outdated. The article also explores Austen's innovative use of techniques such as free indirect style, which allows readers to see the moral blind spots of her characters. Austen's emphasis on the inner lives of young women was groundbreaking and influenced later novelists. Overall, Austen's novels are celebrated for their wit, insight into human nature, and ability to capture the thoughts and emotions of their characters. [Extracted from the article]

This document explores the presence of horror in fairy tales, challenging the notion that they are solely associated with happy endings and moral lessons. It discusses the violent and gruesome elements found in the Grimms' fairy tales and argues that horror is a distinctive feature of literary fairy tales. The document also examines the influence of Gothic horror on the Grimms' tales and the use of horror as a cautionary and educational tool. It concludes by highlighting the entertainment value of horror in fairy tales and the universal themes and fears they represent. The text also explores the presence of horror in retold fairy tales, including the concept of "gender horror" where female characters experience domestic abuse and other traumatic experiences. It emphasizes the fluidity and transformative nature of fairy tales, as they continue to evolve and resonate with diverse audiences. [Extracted from the article]

At the beginning of his Creole opus The Grandissimes, George Washington Cable refers to Louisiana as "A land hung in mourning, darkened by gigantic cypresses, submerged; a land of reptiles, silence, shadow, decay". This anti-pastoral view of Louisiana as an ecosystem of horrific nature and the very human melancholy it breeds is one that has persisted in popular American culture to the present day. However, the literature of Louisiana itself is marked by its creativity in blending elements of folktales, fairy tales, and local color. This paper proposes to examine the transhuman, or the transcendence of the natural by means of supernatural transformation, in folk horror tales of Louisiana. As the locus where the fairy tale meets the burgeoning Southern Gothic, these tales revolve around a reworking of what Vladimir Propp refers to as transfiguration, the physical and metaphysical alteration of the human into something beyond the human. The focus of this paper will be on three recurring figures in Louisiana folk horror: yellow fever, voodoo, and the Devil. Drawing upon works including Alcée Fortier's collection of Creole folktales Louisiana Folktales (1895), Dr. Alfred Mercier's "1878", and various newspaper tales of voodoo ceremonies from the ante- and post-bellum periods, this article brings together theorizations about the fairy tale from Vladimir Propp and Jack Zipes and historiological approaches to the Southern Gothic genre to demonstrate that Louisiana, in its multilingual literary traditions, serves as a nexus where both genres blend uncannily together to create tales that are both geographically specific and yet exist outside of the historical time of non-fantastic fiction. Each of these figures, yellow fever, voodoo, and the Devil, challenges the expectations of what limits the human. Thus, this paper seeks to examine what will be termed the "Louisiana gothic", a particular blend of fairy-tale timelessness, local color, and the transfiguration of the human. Ultimately, the Louisiana gothic, as expressed in French, English, and Creole, tends toward a view of society in decay, mobilizing these elements of horror and of fairy tales to comment on a society that, after the revolution in Saint-Domingue, the Louisiana Purchase, and the Civil War, was seen as falling into inevitable decline. This commentary on societal decay, expressed through elements of folk horror, sets apart Louisiana gothic as a distinct subgenre that challenges conventions about the structures and functions of the fairy tale. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Despite growing evidence of the potential of arts-based modalities to translate knowledge and spark discussion on complex issues, applications to health policy are rare. This study explored the potential of a research-based theatrical video to increase public capacity and motivation to engage with the complex issues that make Emergency Department wait times such an intractable problem. Methods: Larry Saves the Canadian Healthcare System is a digital musical micro-series developed from extensive research examining system-level causes of Emergency crowding and the ineffectiveness of prevailing approaches. We released individual episodes and a revised full-length version on YouTube, using organic promotion strategies and paid advertising. We used YouTube Analytics to track views, engagement and viewer demographics, and content-analyzed viewer comments. We also conducted five university-based screenings; 92 students completed questionnaires, rating Larry on 16 descriptors using a 7-point Likert scale. Results: From June 2022 through May 2023, Larry garnered over 100,000 views (76,752 of the full-length version, 35,535 of episodes), 1329 likes, 2780 shares, and 139 comments. Views and watch time were higher among women and positively associated with age. Among YouTube comments, the predominating themes were praise for the video and criticism of the healthcare system. Many commenters applauded the show's accuracy, humor, and/or resonance with their experience; several shared healthcare horror stories. Students overwhelmingly agreed with all positive and disagreed with all negative descriptors, and nearly unanimously deemed the video informative, thought-provoking, and entertaining. Most also affirmed that it had increased their knowledge, interest, and confidence to participate in discussions about healthcare issues. Neither gender, primary language, nor employment in healthcare predicted ratings, but graduate students and those 25+ years old evaluated the video most positively. Discussion: These findings highlight the promise of research-informed musical satire to inform and invigorate discourse on an urgent health policy problem. Larry has reached tens of thousands of viewers, garnered excellent feedback, and received high student ratings. Further research should directly assess educational and behavioural outcomes and explore what facilitative strategies could maximize this knowledge translation product's potential to foster informed, impactful policy dialogue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article mounts an initial exploratory engagement with the weird fiction of Henry S. Whitehead, framed by American imperial expansion into the Caribbean in the interwar years. It situates Whitehead and his work within the wider historical context and shows how Whitehead himself used and played with history as part of his fiction. The article considers the role of light in Whitehead's fiction and imperial projects, as well as the way that Whitehead's work, as horror fiction, both shapes and seeks to dispel notions of the Caribbean as a space of horror. As well as offering some initial conclusions, the article seeks to open further lines for future investigation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Acta Neophilologica is the property of Acta Neophilologica and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Horror is a genre of science fiction which is intended to, or has the capacity to frighten, scare or disgust the readers by inducing feelings of horror and terror. This piece of fiction in prose of variable length also shocks and startles the readers inducing feelings of repulsion or loathing through creating a frightening atmosphere. Horror is frequently supernatural, though it can be non-supernatural. Often the central menace of a work of horror fiction can be interpreted as a metaphor for the larger fears of a society. The present investigation of horror in E. A. Poe's short stories through the linguo-stylistic and case study methods of analyses aims to disclose the very distinct role of horror fiction in the perspective of human emotions - a kind of "mediator" between the world and its reflection in the language. The results show that emotions as a psychological, physiological and philosophical phenomenon verbally reproduce the emotional attitude of the person towards the world, that emotions are contained, fixed, expressed and indicated in utterances in the form of ideas - and as such - emotions are a perfect object of linguo-stylistic study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of many "Ticketmaster horror stories" is the ticketing fiasco of the 2022 Taylor Swift tour, with tickets removed from baskets and fans kicked out of the queue, unable to buy tickets. Live Nation Entertainment, the combination of promoter Live Nation and ticketing company Ticketmaster, blamed unexpected demand. But while the company had an incentive to cast blame elsewhere, it also had no reason to care about quality. As a monopolist, it was not subject to a competitive marketplace. It could offer a bad product and not worry about customers fleeing from bots and cyberattacks. Ticketmaster has had control over the ticketing market for decades. And after its merger with Live Nation, the top U.S. entertainment provider, in 2010, its power expanded into promotion, where it has relationships with many of the top artists. Together, the combined company appears to have engaged in multiple antitrust violations. For starters, Ticketmaster harmed ticketing rivals by locking venues into multiyear contracts to take its ticketing services. This is "exclusive dealing." For any venues not part of these arrangements, the company threatened: "You want our artist? You must take our tickets." This is a classic "tying" violation. It engaged in deception when it used "bait-and-switch tactics" in selling tickets to fans that led to a settlement with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). Putting together all of these--and other--actions presents an overall course of conduct that constitutes monopolization. The typical remedies for antitrust violations lean toward the modest rather than aggressive side. This case is different. The 2010 merger of Ticketmaster and Live Nation required the company to not force venues wishing to book Live Nation artists to use Ticketmaster's ticketing. But there were so many breaches that the consent decree was extended. Given its numerous blatant violations, the company cannot be trusted to undertake actions a court might compel. For that reason, a breakup of Ticketmaster and Live Nation should be the preferred remedy. Taylor Swift fans rightly were upset when Ticketmaster bungled the rollout of tickets for her 2022 tour. We should all be upset. This Article highlights the strong antitrust case against the company and remedy that can fix this. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Agustina Bazterrica Tender Is the Flesh Trans. Sarah Moses Scribner, 2020 When cannibalism is all that's left due to the extinction of animals, what does it mean to fall in [...]

Excess signals uncontrolled natural agency and thus provides a key ingredient in horror and ecohorror. Because excess ultimately threatens our agency over matter and meaning, nature comes to threaten the fall and dissolution of humanity, offer an erasure of what it means to be human, and exert a muffling of the very agency that defines our sense of our exceptionalism. Yet horror and ecohorror also enthrall. They do so precisely because they provide a perversely traumatophilic/traumatophobic sensation, a paradoxical presence of opposites that somehow, like sweet-and-sour soup for the psyche, tastes good. We watch or read ecohorror for the attraction and repulsion its various traumas offer. Horror and the disgusting captivate us, reminding us at the same time of our corporeality and its fragility. Slime is central here. Slime is the horror of boundary transgressions, of indefinability, of unstoppability, of corporeal and natural agency. Reactions to slime reveal not only a fear of nature but a fear of women, and understanding theoretical connections between sexism and ecophobia is a critical step toward ending both. Central here is understanding how the balancing between attraction and repulsion, traumatophilia and traumatophobia, produces compelling spectacle that is entertaining but stimulates no activist engagement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The ambivalent attraction of feeling horror might explain someparadoxes regarding the consumption of representations of atrocities committed in the real world, in the past, on actual other people. How do horror fictions work in the transmission or exploitation of historical trauma? How might they function as prosthetic memories, at once disturbing and informative to readers who might otherwise not be exposed to those histories at all? What are the ethical implications of horror elicited by fictional representations of historical suffering? This article engages these questions through the reading of Mo Hayder's 2004 novel The Devil of Nanking. Hayder exploits horror's appeal and also--by foregrounding the acts of representation, reading, and spectatorship that generate this response--opens that process to critique. The novel may productively be understood as a work of posttraumatic fiction, both containing and exposing the concentric layers of our representational engagement with records of past atrocity. Through such a reading, a spherical rather than linear topology emerges for history itself, a structure of haunted and embodied consumption. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite winning numerous literary awards, Caitlín R. Kiernan's work has received little critical attention. Scholars have focused onKiernan's reworking of H. P. Lovecraft's influential weird fiction and have discussed Kiernan's pioneering work in New Weird fiction and short fiction. As astute as much of the critical work is, none of it addresses the cornerstone of Kiernan's fiction: trauma. This essay considers Kiernan's novel The Red Tree as a queer American gothic novel dealing with trauma and its lingering effects on its witnesses. Through its complex, fragmentary formand its use of dreamsequences and unconsciously produced narratives, the novel invites readers to witness and consume Sarah Crowe's trauma while loosely theorizing the relationship between trauma and queer temporality and spatiality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves (2000), a gothic novel that augments its postmodernist credentials by preemptively imagining and representing the theoretical gaze that would otherwise have been directed on itself. The article suggests that despite the novel's intense performance of self-reflexivity, it demonstrates a traumatic suppression of its own immediate historical conditions, particularly its temporal proximity to the events of the First Gulf War. This article thus reads the text's telling silences and its thematization of uncanny spatial violations as indexing a minimally acknowledged guilt over the war in Iraq. The novel's slippages in self-awareness not only point to an avoidance of its own scotomized history but also foreground the shifting boundaries and dispersed locations of textual self-consciousness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores the theme of haunting in the Southern United States, particularly in relation to the presence of ghosts and spirits. It discusses the acceptance of the dead and their influence on daily life in places like New Orleans. The article also examines different perspectives on living with spirits, including the practices of hoodoo and holler magic. It emphasizes the importance of mutual respect and understanding when dealing with haints (spirits) and acknowledges the ongoing impact of past traumas in the South. [Extracted from the article]

Stoker’s Dracula frames the entire narrative in the context of the political dynamic between London and East Europe, and the anxieties surrounding the invasion of the London public and domestic spheres by the Romanian Count. At the beginning of the novel, however, Dracula gives a lengthy account of Romania’s political rivalry with the Turks, referring specifically to the confrontation between the Voivode and the Turks across the Danube River. This political history in Stoker’s Dracula is, however, not explored beyond the initial sections of the novel. The Swedish version of Dracula, titled Powers of Darkness, and published in 1899, explores the political history in a more detailed manner. The Swedish version is not a mere translation of Stoker’s novel, as scholars had believed for long, but features additional scenes and characters, which alter the text in significant ways. This paper will argue that the change in the fictive history in this adaptation is a deliberate creative intervention meant to interpolate Stoker’s narrative with new political tensions and social drama. This changes the nature of horror itself that defines the ‘original’ Dracula. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines three of Dario Argento's supernatural horror films (Suspiria, Phenomena, and Dark Glasses) and their use of fairy tale imagery and narratives, which distinguishes them from murder-mystery-oriented giallo films. In them, Argento locates his characters, rather than in urban environments, in rural spaces (forests, fields, mountains) where the supernatural elements of their stories blossom. Suspiria represents a primarily aesthetic exploration of parallels between fairy tales and contemporary horror, while Phenomena uses these two modes to examine the conflict between the rational and irrational, the natural and the supernatural. Dark Glasses initially appears to be one of his more traditional gialli, but it abandons these tropes with a simplified plot evoking the story of "Little Red Riding Hood"; this shift is accomplished by moving the action of the film out of Rome and into the dark forests of the countryside. Dark Glasses, I argue, therefore represents a self-conscious move to unite in a single film the two major strands of Argento's filmography and to expose some fundamental elements of his general cinematic approach—namely, the unique capacity of stylized aesthetics and irrational elements to convey the experience of very real, human terror and evil. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ethnographers' concerns about institutional ethics review are by now well-known and several hypotheses have been advanced to explain their complaints. Many have highlighted the lack of epistemological fit between ethnographic methods and ethics review paradigms. Others point to the existence of a "victim narrative" and suggest that circulating horror stories are unrepresentative of ethnographers' experiences, or argue that ethnographers' complaints disguise a self-interested and un-reflexive desire to avoid oversight. A final explanation suggests that resistance is restricted to an ageing cohort of scholars raised in an era before ethics review became the norm. Drawing on two surveys of ethnographers conducted a decade apart, we conclude that the most convincing explanation for the longstanding "chorus of complaint" is the fundamental epistemological conflict between ethnographic methods and the way ethics review is currently constituted. We conclude that the time has come to radically reframe and restructure ethics review regimes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On film, care for people with dementia looks like bleak work. Tragedy and horror are the film genres most often deployed to represent dementia care, reflecting the austere material realities of that care in the United States today. Despite decades of feminist organizing around the importance of care labor, the current shortage of carers for aging and disabled people in the United States suggests that few view it as a first-choice job. Two recent documentaries, cocreated by a person with dementia and their carer, dispute the horror story of dementia care: Michelle Memran and Irene Fornes's The Rest I Make Up and Kirsten Johnson and Dick Johnson's Dick Johnson Is Dead reveal the creative possibilities of dementia care as well as the care work fundamental to filmmaking. I compare the labor of filmmaking with the labor of caring in these documentaries to argue that they transform dementia care into aspirational labor—labor that, like filmmaking itself, can be recognized and experienced as valuable, creative work. I assert that these films reconfigure a landscape of bleak and austere care labor, experiment with ways of living in which care work is well distributed and well liked, and envision dementia care as care we all might give and receive. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Toldo de Astier is the property of Universidad Nacional de La Plata and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Beneath a warren of streetcar wires on Dundas Street between Little Italy and Little Portugal, nestled among other local businesses--sports bars and laundromats, convenience stores and barbers--there's a new haunt [...]

This article provides information about snakes and snakebites. It explains that there are over 3,000 species of snakes in the world, many of which are poisonous. The most common poisonous snake in the United States is the pit viper. Snakebites can be dangerous, but with proper care and treatment, they are unlikely to cause major injury. The article also discusses why snakes bite, the different types of venomous and non-venomous snakes in the United States, and what to do immediately after a snakebite. It emphasizes the importance of seeking medical attention and provides information on how doctors treat snakebites. The article concludes with tips on how to avoid snakebites. [Extracted from the article]

At the end of the eighteenth century, professional and lay audiences alike negotiated the lines between mental health and disorder, questioning whether criminal behavior, for example, laid within medicine's jurisdiction. This essay examines the role of literature in developing a "diagnostic logic" that trained readers in evolving forms of mental surveillance. First, it shows how physicians like Benjamin Rush relied on popular and literary sources to create new diagnostic categories, citing newspaper crime reports and Shakespearean plays as medical evidence and encouraging readers to interpret familiar behavior through the lens of pathology. Next, I turn to Charles Brockden Brown's Wieland (1798) to demonstrate how the novel's suspicion of empiricism could paradoxically heighten readers' desire to sort and predict behavior. Soliciting readers' interest through scenes of gothic horror, the novel concludes by urging readers to apply their diagnostic skills in more mundane social settings. Moreover, unlike Rush's straightforward assessment of pathology's mitigating impact on accountability, Brown's novel invites readers to reach their own conclusions on the ethical implications of diagnosis. Ultimately, I argue, texts like Wieland did not simply work alongside medical tracts to authorize the surveillance of an increasing number of pathologized behaviors, but deepened readers' engagement in doing so. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The belief in malevolent spiritual beings is found in religions throughout the world. Islam is no exception, and this religion includes the belief in beings known as jinn. These beings often cause harm to humans, typically by possessing them. Jinn possession can be understood in several different ways in Islam and there are specific forms of exorcism depending on the type and strength of the jinn doing the possessing. Additionally, several customs related to the prevention of harm from jinn are prevalent in the Muslim world. Mass media, such as horror films or novels may play a role in perpetuating belief in jinn. While jinn possession is considered pathological some people experience secondary gain from being in a possessed state. These gains include getting attention, having their behavior excused as deviating from cultural norms, and experiencing a release of inhibitions. From a psychological point of view jinn possession is similar dissociative identity disorder. Delusional misidentification disorders may also have a relationship to jinn possession. Psychoanalysis suggests that jinn possession is a symbol of repressed unconscious instincts, and psychoanalytic treatment can be understood as a form of exorcism. Object relations psychology suggests that imaginary beings such as jinn are the projection of unwanted bad objects. Traditional healing techniques from Islam can be used in combination with psychodynamic techniques to help those suffering from jinn possession. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is about the fear of terrorism. The few and mainly quantitative studies on the topic have categorized people as afraid or not afraid, treating fear as a known constant detached from time and space. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Copenhagen, Denmark, this article argues instead that the fear of terrorism is momentary and transient; it flares up as flashes of fear. These flashes are triggered by the sensory experience of the urban environment combined with recollections of mediatized horror stories about previous terrorist attacks. This article shows how affects related to historical events, such as terrorist attacks, do not exclusively linger in the exact places or cities where they unfolded. Rather, affects can also, via media, travel to and flash up in scenarios that are geographically distant yet aesthetically resonant with historical events. This article thus provides an understanding of the temporal and emplaced dimensions of fear, and conceptualizes the relationship between the affects we experience, the surroundings we live in, and the stories we are exposed to via media. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Shirley Jackson's fame during her lifetime as a writer of both Gothic horror stories and domestic humor for mainstream women's publications demonstrates her use of Gothic conventions to illuminate the quotidian horrors of women in the American midcentury. Her work uniquely foregrounds the nation's preoccupation with normativity, deviance, and female sexuality in the 1950s. Jackson's novel The Haunting of Hill House (1959) resists the binaries of normative/deviant or normal/monstrous by demonstrating how perversity lies not in the Gothic sensuality of Hill House bur rather within narratives of female sexual license in mainstream American society. The sexual pathologies and liberations of Eleanor Vance position the house itself as the agent of transgressive female sexuality, exploring the liminal normativity/deviance of the erotics of touch to rewrite master narratives about the coalescing intimacy and authority upon which the family home's stability depends. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Diálogo com a Economia Criativa is the property of Dialogo com a Economia Criativa and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The present study examined whether emotional text content influences cognitive engagement and transportation during listening (Experiment 1) and reading (Experiment 2) of neutral, horror and erotic stories. In Experiment 1, fluctuation in arousal and cognitive engagement were measured by continuous arousal judgments and head movement recordings during story listening. Participants rated experienced transportation and emotional valence after each story. The results showed that emotional texts were more arousing and induced more transportation than neutral stories. There was less head motion overall and a steeper decrease in head motion across time for erotic than neutral or horror stories. In Experiment 2, participants' head movements and reading times were recorded during reading, and participants rated experienced transportation, arousal, and valence after each text. The results showed that emotional texts were more arousing and induced higher transportation than neutral stories. There was less head motion during reading of erotic than neutral or horror texts. Horror texts were read slower and recalled better than neutral or erotic texts. The present results show that emotional text content impacts cognitive engagement during listening and reading of literary texts and demonstrates the importance of methodological triangulation when examining cognitive engagement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I explore translations from Spanish, French, and Russian into Quechua, most of which were produced in the second decade of the 21st century. This includes a story by César Vallejo, translated twice by different translators from the Peruvian department of Apurimac. Additionally, I examine the Quechua translations of The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, rendered into Cuzco-Quechua by Armando Valenzuela and into Southern Quechua by Lydia Cornejo and César Itier. Horror stories have been translated into Ayacucho Quechua, and prefaces to the anthology Poesía Quechua en el Perú have been translated into Ayacucho Quechua by Pablo Landeo. Furthermore, I conduct a comparative analysis of the parallel text in Cuzco-Quechua and in Spanish of the philosophical work Teqse by Mario Mejía. Additionally, I scrutinize translations from Russian into Cuzco Quechua undertaken by Radio Moscow. The primary challenges faced by the translators involve transforming abstract concepts into visualizations and navigating the use of borrowings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay explores the ways Bram Stoker brings eighteenth-century affective gothic reading practices to bear on Victorian fiction's investments in realism. By investigating modes of affective reading in Dracula, the essay develops a definition of 'gothic realism' to describe an affective experience of the real that gothic fiction offers in place of verisimilitude and representations of everyday life. Beginning by tracing the explicit and implicit histories of this term through both literary criticism and the gothic tradition, the essay turns to Dracula to discover an alternative definition of 'gothic realism' that bridges a longstanding divide between the colonial fractures intrinsic to nineteenth-century Irish literature and the claims to coherent representational reality usually aligned with the Victorian novel. 'Gothic realism' becomes a term, and a reading practice, for newly understanding how the gothic entwines with realism across both British and Irish nineteenth-century fiction, not as its critical antithesis, or as its hidden secret, but as an affective mode through which we can see nineteenth-century Irish novels representing the realities of the world around them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent decades, philosophical reflection on the utopian has focused on the analysis of the way in which the future-possible and the radically unknown or "other" influence our present. Specifically, accelerationism and Object-oriented Ontology have identified horror and weird fiction in general, and H. P. Lovecraft in particular, as the privileged field from which to access a radically anti-humanist absolute exteriority (Outside) with the aim of developing a new anti-species worldview, one which Timothy Morton calls "Dark Ecology." This article analyzes the philosophical foundations of this worldview, showing the exclusive and proto-fascist character it harbors, which is why it should be clearly separated from other post-humanisms and/or new materialisms based on the hybridization and interconnection characteristic of relational ontologies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that some supernatural horror fiction has religious affordance – that is, provides ideas that readers can draw upon to build their own religious outlook. In this regard, supernatural horror fiction is an important but previously overlooked part of lived religion. It also demonstrates that the afforded ideas are entwined with the supernatural experiences that the stories describe and looks at rhetorical tropes that dispose readers to believe in those experiences (at least while reading the story), and by extension to entertain the credibility of the religious ideas, as well. It demonstrates the important role that ambiguity, a central feature of supernatural horror fiction since the 1830s, plays in persuading readers to believe in the supernatural experiences and the religious ideas. Two case studies are used to make these arguments: M. R. James's "Oh, Whistle, and I'll Come to You, My Lad" (1904) and Stephen King's Revival (2014). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]