The Female Gothic
New Directions
Page
%P
28 Result(s)
within
Diana Wallace
Literature
-
Chapter
‘Herstory’ to Postmodern Histories: History as Dissent in the 1980s
The 1980s saw the beginnings of a renaissance in the ‘serious’ or ‘literary’ woman’s historical novel, a stream of novels which broadened into a veritable flood in the 1990s. This was part of a general resurge...
-
Chapter
The Convent Novel and the Uses of History
The first Englishwoman of letters is commonly accepted to be the medieval mystic Julian of Norwich, an anchoress living in a cell attached to the church of St Julian in Norwich.1 Born around 1342 or 1343, she was...
-
Book
-
Chapter
Introduction: Defining the Female Gothic
The term ‘Female Gothic’ has become much contested. When Ellen Moers coined the term in 1976 she thought that it could be ‘easily defined’ as ‘the work that women have done in the literary mode that, since the...
-
Chapter
‘The Haunting Idea’: Female Gothic Metaphors and Feminist Theory
In Woman as Force in History (1946) Mary R. Beard identifies ‘one obtruding idea that haunts thousands of printed pages’ dealing with women: ‘It is the image of woman throughout long ages of the past as a being a...
-
Chapter
The Gothic Reader: History, Fear and Trembling
A typical Gothic scene: a young girl sits alone in a darkened room lit only by a guttering candle, her fearful gaze directed not at the text she has been reading, but over her shoulder. It is as if the very ac...
-
Chapter
Historical Fictions
In 1961 the historian Helen Cam noted the contemporaneous vogue for historical fiction, quoting approvingly John Raymond’s comment that, ‘We must all agree … that there is no time like the present for the hist...
-
Chapter
“Everything Is Out of Place”: Virginia Woolf, Women, and (Meta-)Historical Biofiction
Starting from Virginia Woolf’s assertion in Orlando: A Biography (1928) that “when we write of a woman everything is out of place,” this chapter argues that Woolf’s spatial metaphor foregrounds the gendered natur...
