Download or read book Women s sexual liberation from victorian patriarchy in Sheridan Le Fanu s Carmilla written by Ilona Gaul and published by GRIN Verlag. This book was released on 2007-11-16 with total page 16 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Seminar paper from the year 2004 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics, grade: 1,7, University of Marburg (Institute for English and American Studies), course: Blood, Lust and (Un)Death: Vampires in American and British Cultures, language: English, abstract: Carmilla is the concluding story of Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s horror story collection In a Glass Darkly which was published in 1872. Carmilla does not simply complete this collection but raises the topic of lesbianism and thus conveys the most provocative idea of all preceding texts. Considering the extreme prudery prevailing during the Victorian age, the publication of Carmilla represented a real scandal ignoring the severe, moral restrictions of that time. Women were not understood as sexual beings and moreover, homosexuality was a term people were absolutely ignorant of. An erotic relationship with a partner of the same sex was a thing people could not think or dared not to think of. Among others McCormack states, “We begin with a pious clergyman and end with lesbianism, the offence Queen Victoria found unbelievable.” (McCormack 154). Nevertheless or even because of this, Carmilla is Le Fanu’s best remembered work and considered one of the most influential texts of English vampire literature. It is not without reason that Carmilla served Bram Stoker as an inspiration for his novel Dracula which has been the most popular piece of vampire literature until today. Carmilla is set in Styria with no apparent hint when it takes place. The two protagonists Laura and Carmilla are both young girls whose relationship becomes more and more erotic as the story proceeds. Together with her father and a few servants, Laura lives very isolated in the family’s castle with no surroundings but forest for miles. She is more than happy to have finally found a companion in the beautiful Carmilla. Carmilla who turns out to be a vampire seduces Laura and loftily confesses her love to Laura more than once. While the reader is aware of Carmilla’s nature quite early, Laura ignores the obvious until the very end. Laura has ambiguous feelings for her female lover. On the one hand she feels drawn towards her; on the other hand she has a revulsion against Carmilla’s strange behaviour. During the process of Laura being vampirized, she becomes weaker every day and more and more similar to Carmilla. Laura’s father watches this proceeding sorrowfully without being able to help it. In the following, I will show that Laura’s devotion to Carmilla exercised through the vampiric act can be read as a female escape from patriarchal chains. The male characters that all play minor roles lose control of the events and are powerless against the unknown enchantment Carmilla radiates.
Download or read book Women s Sexual Liberation from Victorian Patriarchy in Sheridan Le Fanu s Carmilla written by Ilona Gaul and published by GRIN Verlag. This book was released on 2007-11 with total page 37 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Seminar paper from the year 2004 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics, grade: 1,7, University of Marburg (Institute for English and American Studies), course: Blood, Lust and (Un)Death: Vampires in American and British Cultures, 10 entries in the bibliography, language: English, abstract: Carmilla is the concluding story of Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu's horror story collection In a Glass Darkly which was published in 1872. Carmilla does not simply complete this collection but raises the topic of lesbianism and thus conveys the most provocative idea of all preceding texts. Considering the extreme prudery prevailing during the Victorian age, the publication of Carmilla represented a real scandal ignoring the severe, moral restrictions of that time. Women were not understood as sexual beings and moreover, homosexuality was a term people were absolutely ignorant of. An erotic relationship with a partner of the same sex was a thing people could not think or dared not to think of. Among others McCormack states, "We begin with a pious clergyman and end with lesbianism, the offence Queen Victoria found unbelievable." (McCormack 154). Nevertheless or even because of this, Carmilla is Le Fanu's best remembered work and considered one of the most influential texts of English vampire literature. It is not without reason that Carmilla served Bram Stoker as an inspiration for his novel Dracula which has been the most popular piece of vampire literature until today. Carmilla is set in Styria with no apparent hint when it takes place. The two protagonists Laura and Carmilla are both young girls whose relationship becomes more and more erotic as the story proceeds. Together with her father and a few servants, Laura lives very isolated in the family's castle with no surroundings but forest for miles. She is more than happy to have finally found a companion in the beautiful Carmilla. Carmilla who turns out to be a vampire seduces Laura and loftily confesse
Download or read book I Want to Melt Into Her Body written by Carson Leigh Pender and published by . This book was released on 2021 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Simone de Beauvoir argues in The Second Sex, "The normal sexual act [of intercourse] effectively makes woman dependent on the male and the species. It is he-as for most animals- who has the aggressive role and she who submits to his embrace. . . coitus cannot take place without male consent, and male satisfaction is its natural end result" (385). Essentially, de Beauvoir argues that the act of sex cannot exist without the presence of man, but particularly for heterosexual women, the act of sex is dependent on the presence of, responsibility of, and response of men. However, despite the fact that the construction of masculinity and patriarchy dominates the culture of sex, women have often had powerful sexual identities and expressions of their own that they have been forced to repress. Themes of sexual empowerment, sexual development, and women characters taking control of their own sexual identity are weaved through Victorian literature; yet, existing scholarship on Victorian literature favors analyses of women characters as victims of their own sex rather than complex characters. I postulate that the female characters in Bram Stoker's novel Dracula, J. Sheridan LeFanu's novella Carmilla, and Charlotte Brontë's novel Villette demonstrate significant strides towards identifying the power in their own sexuality despite the challenges of gendered violence they encounter throughout their role in their respective novels. The women characters in these novels demonstrate the ways in which sexual behavior and identity is enticing and freeing amidst gender, class, and sociocultural tension. A feminist analysis reveals, through careful examination of each text, that the sexual aesthetic and performance are used as catalysts for the female protagonist's sexual development. These catalysts are consistent not just in the Victorian era, but onwards into contemporary sex positive rhetoric. -- Abstract, leaf ii
Download or read book Loving Vampires written by Tom Pollard and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2016-03-01 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Vampire characters are ubiquitous in popular culture, serving as metaphors for society's most sensitive subjects--sexuality, gender roles, race, ethnicity, class--and often channeling widespread fears of immigration, crime, terrorism and addiction. This book explores pop culture's vampires variously as sexual seducers, savage monsters, noble protectors and drainers of human power. The author discusses three real-life role models for vampire characters.
Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to Dracula written by Roger Luckhurst and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This celebrated Gothic novel is explored through essays providing critical, historical, anthropological, philosophical and intellectual contexts that serve to further the understanding and appreciation of Dracula in all its many guises. Together the essays offer exciting new critical approaches to the most famous vampire in literature and film.
Download or read book Carmilla written by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu and published by Namaskar Books. This book was released on with total page 94 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Horrifying Sex written by Ruth Bienstock Anolik and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2007-07-16 with total page 277 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Gothic moment in literary history arose in the age of the Enlightenment, and the Gothic fascination with the unknown reflects the Enlightenment's response to the limits of reason. Traditionally, the emblem of the unknown that lurks in the Gothic is the supernatural, the monstrous, and the inhuman. Often overlooked is the observation that Gothic texts are also haunted by figures that represent the mystery of sexuality. This collection of essays sharpens that observation and asserts that Gothic anxieties about sexuality are likewise rooted in fear of the unknown, represented by sexual practices and desires that either lie hidden or deviate from cultural norms. The first three sections refer to popular as well as marginalized Gothic texts to portray the three prototypes of sexual "deviance": the female sexual Other in "The Fatal Woman"; the male sexual Other in "The Satanic Male"; and the homosexual Other in "Homosexual Horror." The fourth section covers literary works that celebrate sexual difference and question the idea that the sexually "deviant" is socially Other.
Download or read book The Cambridge History of Gay and Lesbian Literature written by E. L. McCallum and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2014-11-17 with total page 1203 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Cambridge History of Gay and Lesbian Literature presents a global history of the field and is an unprecedented summation of critical knowledge on gay and lesbian literature that also addresses the impact of gay and lesbian literature on cognate fields such as comparative literature and postcolonial studies. Covering subjects from Sappho and the Greeks to queer modernism, diasporic literatures, and responses to the AIDS crisis, this volume is grounded in current scholarship. It presents new critical approaches to gay and lesbian literature that will serve the needs of students and specialists alike. Written by leading scholars in the field, The Cambridge History of Gay and Lesbian Literature will not only engage readers in contemporary debates but also serve as a definitive reference for gay and lesbian literature for years to come.
Download or read book Fighting the Forces written by Rhonda Wilcox and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2002 with total page 326 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fighting the Forces explores the struggle to create meaning in an impressive example of popular culture, the television series phenomenon Buffy the Vampire Slayer. In the essays collected here, contributors examine the series using a variety of techniques and viewpoints. They analyze the social and cultural issues implicit in the series and place it in its literary context, not only by examining its literary influences (from German liebestod to Huckleberry Finn) but also by exploring the series' purposeful literary allusions. Visit our website for sample chapters!
Download or read book Zofloya Or the Moor written by Charlotte Dacre and published by Legare Street Press. This book was released on 2023-07-18 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This gothic novel follows the story of Victoria, a young woman who falls under the spell of the seductive and mysterious Zofloya, who introduces her to a life of deceit, betrayal and murder. As Victoria becomes more deeply enmeshed in his world, she discovers the terrible secrets that he has been keeping from her and must struggle to escape his grasp before it's too late. A gripping tale of passion and obsession that will keep you on the edge of your seat. This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the "public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.
Download or read book Fledgling written by S. K. Ali and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2024-10-08 with total page 545 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first book in a gripping duology from acclaimed author S.K. Ali introduces a fractured world on the brink of either enlightenment or war. Would you trade love for peace? Raisa of Upper Earth has only lived a life of privilege and acquiescence. Ever dutiful, she accepts her father’s arrangement of her marriage to Lein, Crown Prince of the corrupt, volatile lands of Lower Earth. Though Lein is a stranger, Raisa knows the wedding will unite their vastly different worlds in a pact of peace: an infusion of Upper Earth technology will usher in the final age of enlightenment, ending war between humans forever. Or is justice more urgent? Newly released from imprisonment, Nada of Lower Earth has found her own calling: disrupting the royal wedding. Convinced her cousin Lein’s alliance with Upper Earth will launch an invasive, terrifying form of tyranny, Nada sets out undercover to light the spark of revolution. When Raisa goes missing a week before the wedding, all eyes turn to the rebels, including Nayf, Nada’s twin brother, a fugitive on the run. In Nayf and Raisa meeting, the long-simmering animosity between their worlds slowly burns away into something unexpected. But the Crown Prince wants his bride — and future — back. And he will go to the ends of the earths to reclaim them.
Download or read book Gender in the Vampire Narrative written by Amanda Hobson and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-09-26 with total page 201 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Gender in the Vampire Narrative addresses issues of masculinity and femininity, unpacking cultural norms of gender. This collection demonstrates the way that representations of gender in the vampire narrative traverse a large scope of expectations and tropes. The text offers classroom ready original essays that outline contemporary debates about sexual objectification and gender norms using the lens of the vampire in order to examine the ways those roles are undone and reinforced through popular culture through a specific emphasis on cultural fears and anxieties about gender roles. The essays explore the presentations of gendered identities in a wide variety of sources including novels, films, graphic novels and more, focusing on wildly popular examples, such as The Vampire Diaries, True Blood, and Twilight, and also lesser known works, for instance, Byzantium and The Blood of the Vampire. The authors work to unravel the ties that bind gender to the body and the sociocultural institutions that shape our views of gendered norms and invite students of all levels to engage in interdisciplinary conversations about both theoretical and embodied constructions of gender. This text makes a fascinating accompanying text for many courses, such as first-year studies, literature, film, women’s and gender studies, sociology, popular culture or media studies, cultural studies, American studies or history. Ultimately this is a text for all fans of popular culture. “Hobson and Anyiwo chase the vampire through history and across literature, film, television, and stage, exploring this complexity and offering insightful and accessible analyses that will be enjoyed by students in popular culture, gender studies, and speculative fiction. This collection is not to be missed by those with an interest in feminist cultural studies – or the undead.” – Barbara Gurr, University of Connecticut “Hobson and Anyiwo push the boundaries of the scholarship as it has been written until now.” –Catherine Coker, Texas A&M University Amanda Hobson is Assistant Dean of Students and Director of the Women’s Resource Center at Indiana State University. U. Melissa Anyiwo is a Professor of Politics & History and Coordinator of African American Studies at Curry College in Massachusetts.
Download or read book The Psychology of Sex Vol 1 6 written by Havelock Ellis and published by DigiCat. This book was released on 2022-12-10 with total page 2549 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This edition contains three studies which seem to me to be necessary prolegomena to that analysis of the sexual instinct which must form the chief part of an investigation into the psychology of sex. The first sketches the main outlines of a complex emotional state which is of fundamental importance in sexual psychology; the second, by bringing together evidence from widely different regions, suggests a tentative explanation of facts that are still imperfectly known; the third attempts to show that even in fields where we assume our knowledge to be adequate a broader view of the phenomena teaches us to suspend judgment and to adopt a more cautious attitude. So far as they go, these studies are complete in themselves; their special use, as an introduction to a more comprehensive analysis of sexual phenomena, is that they bring before us, under varying aspects, a characteristic which, though often ignored, is of the first importance in obtaining a clear understanding of the facts: the tendency of the sexual impulse to appear in a spontaneous and to some extent periodic manner, affecting women differently from men. This is a tendency which, later, I hope to make still more apparent, for it has practical and social, as well as psychological, implications. Here—and more especially in the study of those spontaneous solitary manifestations which I call auto-erotic—I have attempted to clear the ground, and to indicate the main lines along which the progress of our knowledge in these fields may best be attained.
Download or read book Gothic Hauntings written by Christine Berthin and published by Springer. This book was released on 2010-04-09 with total page 199 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is buried in the crypts of the Gothic? Building on psychoanalytic research on haunting, cryptonymy and melancholy, as well as on French philosophies of language, this book explores how haunting is not just a Gothic narrative device but the symptom of an impossibility of representation and of an irreparable loss at the heart of language.
Download or read book Women Monstrosity and Horror Film written by Erin Harrington and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-08-10 with total page 315 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Women occupy a privileged place in horror film. Horror is a space of entertainment and excitement, of terror and dread, and one that relishes the complexities that arise when boundaries – of taste, of bodies, of reason – are blurred and dismantled. It is also a site of expression and exploration that leverages the narrative and aesthetic horrors of the reproductive, the maternal and the sexual to expose the underpinnings of the social, political and philosophical othering of women. This book offers an in-depth analysis of women in horror films through an exploration of ‘gynaehorror’: films concerned with all aspects of female reproductive horror, from reproductive and sexual organs, to virginity, pregnancy, birth, motherhood and finally to menopause. Some of the themes explored include: the intersection of horror, monstrosity and sexual difference; the relationships between normative female (hetero)sexuality and the twin figures of the chaste virgin and the voracious vagina dentata; embodiment and subjectivity in horror films about pregnancy and abortion; reproductive technologies, monstrosity and ‘mad science’; the discursive construction and interrogation of monstrous motherhood; and the relationships between menopause, menstruation, hagsploitation and ‘abject barren’ bodies in horror. The book not only offers a feminist interrogation of gynaehorror, but also a counter-reading of the gynaehorrific, that both accounts for and opens up new spaces of productive, radical and subversive monstrosity within a mode of representation and expression that has often been accused of being misogynistic. It therefore makes a unique contribution to the study of women in horror film specifically, while also providing new insights in the broader area of popular culture, gender and film philosophy.
Download or read book Our Vampires Ourselves written by Nina Auerbach and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2012-10-12 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This “vigorous, witty look at the undead as cultural icons in 19th- and 20th-century England and America” examines the many meanings of the vampire myth (Kirkus Reviews). From Byron’s Lord Ruthven to Anne Rice’s Lestat to the black bisexual heroine of Jewelle Gomez’s The Gilda Stories, vampires have taken many forms, capturing and recapturing our imaginations for centuries. In Our Vampires, Ourselves, Nina Auerbach explores the rich history of this literary and cultural phenomenon to illuminate how every age embraces the vampire it needs—and gets the vampire it deserves. Working with a wide range of texts, as well as movies and television, Auerbach follows the evolution of the vampire from 19th century England to 20th century America. Using the mercurial figure as a lens for viewing the last two hundred years of Anglo-American cultural history, “this seductive work offers profound insights into many of the urgent concerns of our time” (Wendy Doniger, The Nation).
Download or read book Carmilla and the Vampyre written by Joseph LeFanu and published by Createspace Independent Publishing Platform. This book was released on 2017-06-08 with total page 138 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Carmilla' is a classic vampire story replete with mystery, tragedy - and ambiguity. 'The Vampyre' is a much earlier story will helped lay the foundation for the gothic genre. Each story played its part in making Bram Stoker's Dracula possible. 'Carmilla' by Irish author Joseph Sheridan LeFanu (1814-1873) was first published in 1872. LeFanu was a leading writer of ghost stories in the 19th Century. 'The Vampyre' by English writer and physician John William Polidori (1795-1821) was first published in 1819.
