Books by Jamil Mustafa
University of Wales Press, August 5, 2023
This book is the first to put Blaxploitation horror films such as Blacula in conversation with bo... more This book is the first to put Blaxploitation horror films such as Blacula in conversation with both mainstream horror movies and classic Gothic stories. Mainstream horror films adapt while Blaxploitation horror films appropriate the vampire, the Frankenstein monster, the evil spirit, the zombie, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and the werewolf for their unique audiences and purposes. Ultimately, Blaxploitation horror films reinvent the archetypes of Gothic fiction and film, not to exploit but to satisfy Black audiences.
Edited Collections by Jamil Mustafa
Humanities, 2023
The Gothic is a wide-ranging mode that comprises multiple genres, including but not limited to li... more The Gothic is a wide-ranging mode that comprises multiple genres, including but not limited to literature, drama, film, television, art, music, games, comics, and graphic novels. It is also a shape-shifting mode. Like vampires or werewolves, expressions of the Gothic frequently and uncannily change form, thereby calling into question the stability and desirability of fixed generic, cultural, and mediatic boundaries. Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897), the most often adapted Gothic text, first took the shape of both a novel and a play before transforming into innumerable plays, operas, ballets, graphic novels, TV shows, films, comics, and games. Extending across genres and centuries alike, versions of Dracula's story are even more multiform and long-lived than the vampire himself. They demonstrate how adaptation is the lifeblood of the Gothic, the means by which it sustains itself, evolves, and meets its moment.
Book Chapters by Jamil Mustafa
Queer Gothic: An Edinburgh Companion (Edinburgh University Press, 2023)
A Gothic imaginative mode that involves law, medicine, and fiction provides a potent means of elu... more A Gothic imaginative mode that involves law, medicine, and fiction provides a potent means of elucidating the construction of homosexuality in the Labouchère Amendment, Psychopathia Sexualis, and Gothic works by Robert Louis Stevenson, Arthur Machen and Bram Stoker. The case, essential in both law and medicine, is also crucial to how these fin-de-siècle Gothic fictions at once align with and diverge from medico-legal representations of queer identity.
Neo-Gothic Narratives: Illusory Allusions from the Past (Anthem Press), 2020
Both neo-Gothicism and vampirism elide past and present, life and death, and shadow and substance... more Both neo-Gothicism and vampirism elide past and present, life and death, and shadow and substance—which last conflation is especially striking in neo-Gothic films and television series about vampires. Like the recorded image of a vampire, the neo-Gothic is a shadow of a shadow. The Gothic and the neo-Gothic tend to merge, rendering the contemporary neo-Gothic work a simulacrum of a simulacrum, positioning its interpreters in a textual mise en abyme, and greatly enhancing its metatextual and intertextual characteristics. Given the compelling parallels between neo-Gothicism and vampirism, neo-Gothic narratives featuring vampires are arguably the richest of all such texts. The shadowy relationship between vampirism and neo-Gothicism is illustrated, with considerable complexity and nuance, by two exemplary neo-Gothic vampire narratives: “A White World Made Red,” an episode of the BBC series Ripper Street (2013–2016), and What We Do in the Shadows (2014), the faux documentary written and directed by Jemaine Clement and Taika Waititi.
Gothic Britain: Dark Places in the Provinces and Margins of the British Isles (University of Wales Press), 2018
Walter Scott was deeply ambivalent about the 1707 Union of Scotland and England, and similarly co... more Walter Scott was deeply ambivalent about the 1707 Union of Scotland and England, and similarly conflicted about the Gothic features of his fiction. Scott’s artistic and political ambivalence adds thematic and formal complexity to those works in which he uses Gothic allegories to depict the Union and its consequences: The Black Dwarf (1816), The Bride of Lammermoor (1819), ‘The Highland Widow’ (1827) and ‘The Two Drovers’ (1827). Rather than confront the Union explicitly, these texts employ allegory in general – and, in The Bride of Lammermoor, the metaphor of marriage-as-Union in particular – to depict tensions between Scotland and England, past and present, and realism and the Gothic.
Wilde's Other Worlds (Routledge), 2018
Given its provocative subject matter, illustrious author, and remarkable virtuosity, "The Harlot'... more Given its provocative subject matter, illustrious author, and remarkable virtuosity, "The Harlot's House" has garnered surprisingly little critical attention. I take an innovative and ambitious approach to Wilde's poem. To argue that "The Harlot's House" is a haunted house, I draw upon deconstruction, queer theory, psychoanalysis, and New Historicism. I also establish the significance of a startling discovery I made while studying a manuscript of the poem in 2012.
The first section, "Apparitional Allegories," shows how "The Harlot's House" is haunted by the ghosts of Poe and Baudelaire, and how its spectrality is bound up with allegory, (un)masking, and projection. The second, "Uncanny Sexualities," demonstrates how the poem allegorizes male prostitution, and how its speaker represses his own queerness. The third, "Spectral Technologies," explores how his repression engages the technologies depicted and suggested by the poem, and how an illustrated version of the poem captures the technological, allegorical, and spectral qualities of the text. These three sections prove that "The Harlot's House" is informed and animated by spectrality, and they demonstrate how haunting enables the poem to draw together phantasmal phenomena ranging from Poe's tales of terror to male brothels, from drag balls to the Praxinoscope.
The Gothic Tradition in Supernatural: Essays on the Television Series (McFarland), 2016
Although “Fan Fiction” appears anomalous, the two-hundredth episode of Supernatural is in fact a ... more Although “Fan Fiction” appears anomalous, the two-hundredth episode of Supernatural is in fact a synecdoche for the entire series and thus both marks and elucidates its longevity. The most striking aspect of “Fan Fiction,” and among the most salient features of the series as a whole, is self-referentiality, “the Charlie Kaufman of it all.” More subtle are the ways in which “Fan Fiction” and other meta episodes exemplify the Gothic features at the core of Supernatural, together with the relationships among these features and the program’s characteristic intertextuality. This last is itself a hallmark of the Gothic, whose earliest incarnations feature stories elaborately framed by pseudo-editorial commentaries and poetic epigraphs, and whose most recent iterations in fiction, film, and TV are thoroughly postmodern in their complex narrative structures and concern with the nature and mechanics of storytelling. The Gothic intertextuality of the meta episodes in particular and Supernatural in general is closely linked to other Gothic features—most notably the uncanny, especially as manifest in narrative doubling and in confrontations between doppelgängers. The uncanny also informs fan fiction inspired by Supernatural, in which characters and their relationships are at once familiar and, most notably in slash fiction, queerly unfamiliar.
To explore how Supernatural both continues and complicates the Gothic narrative tradition, in this essay I focus on the correlation and duplication of intertextuality and the uncanny. I pay particular attention to “Fan Fiction,” “The Monster at the End of This Book” “The Real Ghostbusters,” “The French Mistake,” “Slash Fiction,” and “Meta Fiction,” together with select fan fictions and websites such as Supernatural Wiki. Both acknowledging and moving beyond the classically psychoanalytic formulation of the uncanny, I demonstrate how all the variations of the Freudian uncanny are present in Supernatural (and, indeed, in “Fan Fiction”): the automaton, the unseen, the double, and the repetition-compulsion; and I articulate how, in Supernatural as elsewhere, the uncanny emerges from the repressed. Because what the program represses is queerness, to explore its representations of uncanniness and intertextuality I draw not on Freud but on what theorists of the Gothic such as Paulina Palmer have termed the “queer uncanny,” a valuable concept that enables us, for instance, to locate Destiel and Samifer in the tradition of queer Gothic doppelgängers including Robert Colwan/Gil-Martin, William Wilson, Jekyll/Hyde, and Dorian Gray. Finally, I contend that the Gothic intertextuality and (queer) uncanniness of Supernatural are themselves narrative doubles, and consider the implications of this duplication for the program’s complex relationship to both queerness and storytelling.
Dimensions of Curiosity: Liberal Learning in the 21st Century (University Press of America), 2004
As the invisible hand of the marketplace throttles the liberal arts and those who serve
them, wh... more As the invisible hand of the marketplace throttles the liberal arts and those who serve
them, what might professors in the humanities do to escape the chokehold of consumerism? How do we avoid selling out or becoming irrelevant? How can we rediscover pleasure?
Journal Articles by Jamil Mustafa
Humanities, 2023
Jacques Derrida’s theory of deconstruction provides an ideal means of appreciating and interrogat... more Jacques Derrida’s theory of deconstruction provides an ideal means of appreciating and interrogating the duality central to both Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and its adaptations. Moreover, because deconstruction exposes binary oppositions as artificial and constrictive, it enables us to advance beyond them toward multiplicity, a term used by Gilles Deleuze for a complex, ever-changing, multipart structure that transcends unity. Roy Ward Baker’s Dr Jekyll and Sister Hyde (1971) and episodes of Showtime’s Penny Dreadful (2014–2016) offer fresh ways to think about—and beyond—the duality of culture’s most famously divided pair. The binary oppositions that organize each text are innovative, as are the ways in which these oppositions are reversed and
conflated. Ultimately, these adaptations employ triangulation to deconstruct themselves, thereby demonstrating the limitations and instability of duality, as well as the possibilities of multiplicity.
American Imago, 2021
I consider Jackson's final novel from a multitiered perspective that combines classical psychoana... more I consider Jackson's final novel from a multitiered perspective that combines classical psychoanalysis, object-relations theory, and (psychoanalytic) sociology to explicate the archaic wishes evinced by its protagonist and realized by her tale. I first locate her thoughts and behaviors within the obsessional patterns identified by Sigmund Freud. I then employ Melanie Klein’s concept of the paranoid-schizoid position to complete my analysis of how obsession functions in the text, and in Jackson’s own psyche. Finally, I supplement the insights of Freud and Klein with those of Max Horkheimer and Nancy Chodorow, who help us appreciate how Jackson’s novel reveals links among obsessional neurosis, the paranoid-schizoid position, and the bourgeois family.
Humanities, 2020
Cultural expressions of Orientalism, the Gothic, and the queer are rarely studied together, thoug... more Cultural expressions of Orientalism, the Gothic, and the queer are rarely studied together, though they share uncanny features including spectrality, doubling, and the return of the repressed. An ideal means of investigating these common aspects is neo-Victorian translation, which is likewise uncanny. The neo-Victorian Gothic cable television series Penny Dreadful, set mostly in fin-de-siècle London, employs the character Ferdinand Lyle, a closeted queer Egyptologist and linguist, to depict translation as both interpretation and transformation, thereby simultaneously replicating and challenging late-Victorian attitudes toward queerness and Orientalism.
The New Ray Bradbury Review, 2019
The American Gothic powerfully influenced Ray Bradbury’s writing, and a midwestern carnival inspi... more The American Gothic powerfully influenced Ray Bradbury’s writing, and a midwestern carnival inspired him to become a writer. Bradbury’s favorite work of fiction, and the one that best exemplifies both the Gothic and the carnivalesque qualities of his imagination, is Something Wicked This Way Comes (1962), which tells the story of how the boys Will Halloway and Jim Nightshade, together with Will’s father Charles, confront and defeat Cooger and Dark’s evil carnival. Contrary to scholarly consensus, Something Wicked This Way Comes is a distinctively constructed allegory that represents and critiques American Cold War paranoia in a quintessentially Gothic and carnivalesque fashion, by illustrating how laughter conquers fear. In it, the Gothic and the carnivalesque work together to explore related historical and psychological phenomena.
Neo-Victorian Studies, 2018
Beginning with the premise that neo-Victorian films and television programmes set in the late-Vic... more Beginning with the premise that neo-Victorian films and television programmes set in the late-Victorian era offer especially rich objects of study for those interested in gender and sexuality, this article explores how masculinity is constructed and problematised in Sherlock Holmes (2009), Crimson Peak (2015), Ripper Street (2012-2016), and Penny Dreadful (2014-2016). These representations of masculinity are marked by uncanniness, pervasive tensions, and liberatory possibilities, and enriched by generic and visual features. They depict the public sphere as the principal site for masculinity's definition and expression, while linking voyeurism with violence and investigating how distinctions between England and America influence masculine identity and desire. As these representations critique the masculine valorisation of exploration and conquest, they demonstrate how men's success in the public sphere is undercut by failure in the private one. They thereby make familiar markers of manliness unfamiliar, and empower women. By portraying men who both exemplify and cope with the many dimensions and ever-changing nature of masculinity, Sherlock Holmes, Crimson Peak, Ripper Street, and Penny Dreadful address twenty-first-century viewers whose world has been changed by significant shifts in gender roles and responsibilities, thus enabling men cathartically to experience and resolve a return of repressed anxieties about what it means to be a man.
Cabinet Des Fées: A Fairy Tale Journal, 2007
While Angela Carter’s retellings of classic fairy tales have attracted considerable scholarly not... more While Angela Carter’s retellings of classic fairy tales have attracted considerable scholarly notice, very little of this attention has been directed to “The Lady of the House of Love.” Yet the story merits and rewards close study—both for its ingenuity and sumptuous prose, and for the ways in which it foregrounds (illicit) sexuality. “The Lady of the House of Love” combines the primal power of Giambattista Basile’s Sleeping Beauty story with the sophistication of Charles Perrault’s, while updating the tale for postmodern readers by hybridizing it with Gothic fiction and problematizing its traditional gender roles.
Studies in the Humanities, 2005
Contrary to critical consensus, the Gothic elements in Hardy’s major novels are neither superfluo... more Contrary to critical consensus, the Gothic elements in Hardy’s major novels are neither superfluous nor simplistic. They are, in fact, both absolutely essential and richly overdetermined. His masterwork, Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891), is not a story
with (unnecessary) Gothic elements but a Gothic novel per se. A tenebrous allegory of
death and sexual repression, Tess is as much a part of the late-Victorian Gothic renaissance as Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), and Dracula (1897). Hardy’s novel rightfully belongs alongside these works as one of a series of dark masterpieces produced in relation to the sexual anxieties of the fin de siècle.
Fiction by Jamil Mustafa
Websites by Jamil Mustafa
https://editions.covecollective.org/edition/harlots-house
https://lewislitjournal.wordpress.com/2011/05/06/faculty-feature-the-yellow-wallpaper/
https://newcityfilm.com/2008/10/22/
Uploads
Books by Jamil Mustafa
Edited Collections by Jamil Mustafa
Book Chapters by Jamil Mustafa
The first section, "Apparitional Allegories," shows how "The Harlot's House" is haunted by the ghosts of Poe and Baudelaire, and how its spectrality is bound up with allegory, (un)masking, and projection. The second, "Uncanny Sexualities," demonstrates how the poem allegorizes male prostitution, and how its speaker represses his own queerness. The third, "Spectral Technologies," explores how his repression engages the technologies depicted and suggested by the poem, and how an illustrated version of the poem captures the technological, allegorical, and spectral qualities of the text. These three sections prove that "The Harlot's House" is informed and animated by spectrality, and they demonstrate how haunting enables the poem to draw together phantasmal phenomena ranging from Poe's tales of terror to male brothels, from drag balls to the Praxinoscope.
To explore how Supernatural both continues and complicates the Gothic narrative tradition, in this essay I focus on the correlation and duplication of intertextuality and the uncanny. I pay particular attention to “Fan Fiction,” “The Monster at the End of This Book” “The Real Ghostbusters,” “The French Mistake,” “Slash Fiction,” and “Meta Fiction,” together with select fan fictions and websites such as Supernatural Wiki. Both acknowledging and moving beyond the classically psychoanalytic formulation of the uncanny, I demonstrate how all the variations of the Freudian uncanny are present in Supernatural (and, indeed, in “Fan Fiction”): the automaton, the unseen, the double, and the repetition-compulsion; and I articulate how, in Supernatural as elsewhere, the uncanny emerges from the repressed. Because what the program represses is queerness, to explore its representations of uncanniness and intertextuality I draw not on Freud but on what theorists of the Gothic such as Paulina Palmer have termed the “queer uncanny,” a valuable concept that enables us, for instance, to locate Destiel and Samifer in the tradition of queer Gothic doppelgängers including Robert Colwan/Gil-Martin, William Wilson, Jekyll/Hyde, and Dorian Gray. Finally, I contend that the Gothic intertextuality and (queer) uncanniness of Supernatural are themselves narrative doubles, and consider the implications of this duplication for the program’s complex relationship to both queerness and storytelling.
them, what might professors in the humanities do to escape the chokehold of consumerism? How do we avoid selling out or becoming irrelevant? How can we rediscover pleasure?
Journal Articles by Jamil Mustafa
conflated. Ultimately, these adaptations employ triangulation to deconstruct themselves, thereby demonstrating the limitations and instability of duality, as well as the possibilities of multiplicity.
with (unnecessary) Gothic elements but a Gothic novel per se. A tenebrous allegory of
death and sexual repression, Tess is as much a part of the late-Victorian Gothic renaissance as Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), and Dracula (1897). Hardy’s novel rightfully belongs alongside these works as one of a series of dark masterpieces produced in relation to the sexual anxieties of the fin de siècle.
Fiction by Jamil Mustafa
Websites by Jamil Mustafa
The first section, "Apparitional Allegories," shows how "The Harlot's House" is haunted by the ghosts of Poe and Baudelaire, and how its spectrality is bound up with allegory, (un)masking, and projection. The second, "Uncanny Sexualities," demonstrates how the poem allegorizes male prostitution, and how its speaker represses his own queerness. The third, "Spectral Technologies," explores how his repression engages the technologies depicted and suggested by the poem, and how an illustrated version of the poem captures the technological, allegorical, and spectral qualities of the text. These three sections prove that "The Harlot's House" is informed and animated by spectrality, and they demonstrate how haunting enables the poem to draw together phantasmal phenomena ranging from Poe's tales of terror to male brothels, from drag balls to the Praxinoscope.
To explore how Supernatural both continues and complicates the Gothic narrative tradition, in this essay I focus on the correlation and duplication of intertextuality and the uncanny. I pay particular attention to “Fan Fiction,” “The Monster at the End of This Book” “The Real Ghostbusters,” “The French Mistake,” “Slash Fiction,” and “Meta Fiction,” together with select fan fictions and websites such as Supernatural Wiki. Both acknowledging and moving beyond the classically psychoanalytic formulation of the uncanny, I demonstrate how all the variations of the Freudian uncanny are present in Supernatural (and, indeed, in “Fan Fiction”): the automaton, the unseen, the double, and the repetition-compulsion; and I articulate how, in Supernatural as elsewhere, the uncanny emerges from the repressed. Because what the program represses is queerness, to explore its representations of uncanniness and intertextuality I draw not on Freud but on what theorists of the Gothic such as Paulina Palmer have termed the “queer uncanny,” a valuable concept that enables us, for instance, to locate Destiel and Samifer in the tradition of queer Gothic doppelgängers including Robert Colwan/Gil-Martin, William Wilson, Jekyll/Hyde, and Dorian Gray. Finally, I contend that the Gothic intertextuality and (queer) uncanniness of Supernatural are themselves narrative doubles, and consider the implications of this duplication for the program’s complex relationship to both queerness and storytelling.
them, what might professors in the humanities do to escape the chokehold of consumerism? How do we avoid selling out or becoming irrelevant? How can we rediscover pleasure?
conflated. Ultimately, these adaptations employ triangulation to deconstruct themselves, thereby demonstrating the limitations and instability of duality, as well as the possibilities of multiplicity.
with (unnecessary) Gothic elements but a Gothic novel per se. A tenebrous allegory of
death and sexual repression, Tess is as much a part of the late-Victorian Gothic renaissance as Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), and Dracula (1897). Hardy’s novel rightfully belongs alongside these works as one of a series of dark masterpieces produced in relation to the sexual anxieties of the fin de siècle.