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An interesting contradiction runs through Fred Botting's book. For Botting, the source of Gothic's energy resides in monstrosity; that is to say, in the genre's vocation for articulating misshaped boundaries. For Botting, the question of whether the Gothic is radical or reactionary is misplaced. The Gothic's endurance and pervasiveness is owing, rather, to its ambivalence. The Gothic tarries over culturally-sensitive boundaries with the express mission of enforcing closure, expelling the deviant and restoring norms. But in order to reinstate the shapely, it must dally with the monstrous; it must, if not name, then shadow, the proscribed, thus giving life to the very thing it abominates. The Gothic, as a result, has always been on difficult terms with narrative, for its secret object is that which defeats narrative, or calls it into question. Hence, in its more serious mode, the Gothic's tortuous framing and inset devices; devices which, in the genre's ludic condition, become parodic and self-referential. By way of contrast, Botting's narrative is elegant and streamlined: the very antithesis of a loose baggy monster.Part of The New Critical Idiom series, Gothic is primarily addressed to a student audience. Botting attempts something not done since David Punter's The Literature of Terror, and that is to provide a history of Gothic from its beginnings to the present, taking in cinema along the way, but in considerably fewer pages. Gothic is a miracle of compression. We begin with the usual beginnings: Graveyard poetry; the novel/romance debate; the myth of the Goth; the sublime. We are taken through Walpole,
Paradigmatically for twentieth Century writing, authors like Vladimir Nabokov and Salman Rushdie share a preoccupation with the theme and literary textures of migrancy. Critical views about the role of the migrant in their fiction ränge from the ascription of a mouthpiece mission to attacks on an alleged elitist alienation. The current debate about the possible functions of displacement, highlighted in the criticism of Edward Said and Homi Bhabha, can usefully be focussed on Nabokov and Rushdie äs writers between cultures whose narrative codes they share. A comparison of their major novels Lolita and The Moor's Last Sigh reveals common themes and structures äs well äs a basic dissimilarity in the overall treatment of individual dislocation. While Nabokov's literary politics in Lolita reassert a self-reflexive aestheticist stance, Rushdie attempts to transcend this position by developing an aesthetics of hybridity that spatializes migrancy in a postmodern literary discourse.
The publication of Beckett’s letters and the availability of the manuscript of Murphy have thrown new light on the curious chess game at the novel’s dénouement. In tracing the revisions from manuscript through publication and subsequent translations, I compare Beckett’s play with the conventions of the game and reconstruct the largely parodic hidden agenda of chess references in Beckett’s early work, their roots and ambivalences, as well as their place in the larger context of Beckett’s writing.
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