Mise-en-scène: The Journal of Film & Visual Narration , 2022
John Carpenter’s The Thing opened forty years ago in a box office crowded with science fiction fi... more John Carpenter’s The Thing opened forty years ago in a box office crowded with science fiction films, and failed to win acclaim. Since then, it has been recognized as a classic horror film. This review explains why audiences have kept coming back to The Thing by examining the kernel of the real around which it wraps. It starts by considering the ways in which Carpenter’s film returns to its sources and continues to reverberate. Next, it argues that the film’s narrative returns us to an unnameable trauma. The story holds, but it is interrupted by moments of sheer visual enjoyment. At the same time, the film’s practical effects return us to the cinema of attractions. By returning us to its own history, to those traumas that stand beyond the reach of art, and to the history of cinema itself, The Thing keeps viewers watching, and watching again.
The article aims to explore how the supernatural is represented in Ann Radcliffe’s Gothic novel, ... more The article aims to explore how the supernatural is represented in Ann Radcliffe’s Gothic novel, The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), arguing that it reflects Radcliffe’s ideas on the matter, described in her theoretical work On the Supernatural in Poetry (1826). Following Walter Scott’s representation of Radcliffe in his work Lives of the Novelists (1825), her works have been associated with the concept of the explained supernatural. The articles argues that the supernatural present in The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) complicates the subjective safety implied by the explained supernatural, a complication visible in the novel’s narrative closure.
English LiteratureTheories, Interpretations, Contexts, 2021
The article aims to explore how the supernatural is represented in Ann Radcliffe’s Gothic novel, ... more The article aims to explore how the supernatural is represented in Ann Radcliffe’s Gothic novel, The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), arguing that it reflects Radcliffe’s ideas on the matter, described in her theoretical work On the Supernatural in Poetry(1826). Following Walter Scott’s representation of Radcliffe in his work Lives of the Novelists (1825), her works have been associated with the concept of the explained supernatural. The articles argues that the supernatural present in The Mysteries of Udolpho (179 4) complicates the subjective safety implied by the explained supernatural, a complication visible in the novel’s narrative closure.
If your library subscribes to the ProQuest Dissertations & Theses (PQDT) database, you ma... more If your library subscribes to the ProQuest Dissertations & Theses (PQDT) database, you may be entitled to a free electronic version of this graduate work. If not, you will have the option to purchase one, and access a 24 page preview for free (if available).
Critics have long considered Charlotte Lennox’s The Female Quixote [1752] either a satire on exce... more Critics have long considered Charlotte Lennox’s The Female Quixote [1752] either a satire on excessive sensibility brought on by romance reading or a proto-feminist fantasy of female empowerment. The novel’s main character, Arabella, endorses both of these readings, as she appears as a power-wielding Quixote, commanding the men around her to follow her incomprehensible whim. As attractive (or repulsive) as Arabella may be, it is dangerous to understand her too quickly. Rather than a warning or a model, I read Arabella as the bait in a trap Lennox lays to catch novel readers.
I argue that The Female Quixote is actually a warning about understanding human motivation in the way that realistic novels require their readers to do. Lennox’s novel has long been recognized as an intervention on genre and gender, but the intervention is usually framed as happening between femininity and romance fiction. Arabella, whose head has been turned by romance, is not simply a confused Quixote. She is also a rare repository of disinterested virtue. By presenting calculating self interest in the voice of the narrator and the character of Charlotte Glanville, Lennox focuses attention not on the dangerously sentimental romance, but on the dangerously instrumental novel. Critical misunderstanding of the novel’s main character, particularly of her conversion at the end of the novel, is an index of the power of the novel genre’s sway on our understanding of desire.
Freed of the assumption that the narrator unironically reports Arabella’s reality, the real target of Lennox’s satire becomes apparent. By the middle of the eighteenth century, there was no real need to warn impressionable young women about the dangers of fancy fueled by reading bad French romances in worse English translations. There was a real need, and indeed there may still be a real need, to consider the dangers of instrumental reason fueled by reading realistic novels which discount the very possibility of disinterested virtue. While Lennox recognizes the dangers of unfettered fancy, she also recognizes the bad effects of human relations determined entirely by calculation. That is why her novel ends not simply with a reformed Arabella, but with a heroine who is an amalgam of novel rationality and romance sentiment. If she has settled for marriage, she has not extinguished the source of “every virtue and laudable affectation of the mind,” which we hear informs that marriage.
In my presentation, I will succinctly lay out the stakes of our understanding of The Female Quixote in terms of genre and gender and support my claims with close readings of two key passages in the novel. Next, I will briefly consider the larger implications of the understanding of desire endorsed here by Lennox. Arabella’s journey from Quixote to wife is not as straightforward as it might initially seem, and neither are Lennox’s purposes in writing this novel.
Mise-en-scène: The Journal of Film & Visual Narration , 2022
John Carpenter’s The Thing opened forty years ago in a box office crowded with science fiction fi... more John Carpenter’s The Thing opened forty years ago in a box office crowded with science fiction films, and failed to win acclaim. Since then, it has been recognized as a classic horror film. This review explains why audiences have kept coming back to The Thing by examining the kernel of the real around which it wraps. It starts by considering the ways in which Carpenter’s film returns to its sources and continues to reverberate. Next, it argues that the film’s narrative returns us to an unnameable trauma. The story holds, but it is interrupted by moments of sheer visual enjoyment. At the same time, the film’s practical effects return us to the cinema of attractions. By returning us to its own history, to those traumas that stand beyond the reach of art, and to the history of cinema itself, The Thing keeps viewers watching, and watching again.
The article aims to explore how the supernatural is represented in Ann Radcliffe’s Gothic novel, ... more The article aims to explore how the supernatural is represented in Ann Radcliffe’s Gothic novel, The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), arguing that it reflects Radcliffe’s ideas on the matter, described in her theoretical work On the Supernatural in Poetry (1826). Following Walter Scott’s representation of Radcliffe in his work Lives of the Novelists (1825), her works have been associated with the concept of the explained supernatural. The articles argues that the supernatural present in The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) complicates the subjective safety implied by the explained supernatural, a complication visible in the novel’s narrative closure.
English LiteratureTheories, Interpretations, Contexts, 2021
The article aims to explore how the supernatural is represented in Ann Radcliffe’s Gothic novel, ... more The article aims to explore how the supernatural is represented in Ann Radcliffe’s Gothic novel, The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), arguing that it reflects Radcliffe’s ideas on the matter, described in her theoretical work On the Supernatural in Poetry(1826). Following Walter Scott’s representation of Radcliffe in his work Lives of the Novelists (1825), her works have been associated with the concept of the explained supernatural. The articles argues that the supernatural present in The Mysteries of Udolpho (179 4) complicates the subjective safety implied by the explained supernatural, a complication visible in the novel’s narrative closure.
If your library subscribes to the ProQuest Dissertations & Theses (PQDT) database, you ma... more If your library subscribes to the ProQuest Dissertations & Theses (PQDT) database, you may be entitled to a free electronic version of this graduate work. If not, you will have the option to purchase one, and access a 24 page preview for free (if available).
Critics have long considered Charlotte Lennox’s The Female Quixote [1752] either a satire on exce... more Critics have long considered Charlotte Lennox’s The Female Quixote [1752] either a satire on excessive sensibility brought on by romance reading or a proto-feminist fantasy of female empowerment. The novel’s main character, Arabella, endorses both of these readings, as she appears as a power-wielding Quixote, commanding the men around her to follow her incomprehensible whim. As attractive (or repulsive) as Arabella may be, it is dangerous to understand her too quickly. Rather than a warning or a model, I read Arabella as the bait in a trap Lennox lays to catch novel readers.
I argue that The Female Quixote is actually a warning about understanding human motivation in the way that realistic novels require their readers to do. Lennox’s novel has long been recognized as an intervention on genre and gender, but the intervention is usually framed as happening between femininity and romance fiction. Arabella, whose head has been turned by romance, is not simply a confused Quixote. She is also a rare repository of disinterested virtue. By presenting calculating self interest in the voice of the narrator and the character of Charlotte Glanville, Lennox focuses attention not on the dangerously sentimental romance, but on the dangerously instrumental novel. Critical misunderstanding of the novel’s main character, particularly of her conversion at the end of the novel, is an index of the power of the novel genre’s sway on our understanding of desire.
Freed of the assumption that the narrator unironically reports Arabella’s reality, the real target of Lennox’s satire becomes apparent. By the middle of the eighteenth century, there was no real need to warn impressionable young women about the dangers of fancy fueled by reading bad French romances in worse English translations. There was a real need, and indeed there may still be a real need, to consider the dangers of instrumental reason fueled by reading realistic novels which discount the very possibility of disinterested virtue. While Lennox recognizes the dangers of unfettered fancy, she also recognizes the bad effects of human relations determined entirely by calculation. That is why her novel ends not simply with a reformed Arabella, but with a heroine who is an amalgam of novel rationality and romance sentiment. If she has settled for marriage, she has not extinguished the source of “every virtue and laudable affectation of the mind,” which we hear informs that marriage.
In my presentation, I will succinctly lay out the stakes of our understanding of The Female Quixote in terms of genre and gender and support my claims with close readings of two key passages in the novel. Next, I will briefly consider the larger implications of the understanding of desire endorsed here by Lennox. Arabella’s journey from Quixote to wife is not as straightforward as it might initially seem, and neither are Lennox’s purposes in writing this novel.
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I argue that The Female Quixote is actually a warning about understanding human motivation in the way that realistic novels require their readers to do. Lennox’s novel has long been recognized as an intervention on genre and gender, but the intervention is usually framed as happening between femininity and romance fiction. Arabella, whose head has been turned by romance, is not simply a confused Quixote. She is also a rare repository of disinterested virtue. By presenting calculating self interest in the voice of the narrator and the character of Charlotte Glanville, Lennox focuses attention not on the dangerously sentimental romance, but on the dangerously instrumental novel. Critical misunderstanding of the novel’s main character, particularly of her conversion at the end of the novel, is an index of the power of the novel genre’s sway on our understanding of desire.
Freed of the assumption that the narrator unironically reports Arabella’s reality, the real target of Lennox’s satire becomes apparent. By the middle of the eighteenth century, there was no real need to warn impressionable young women about the dangers of fancy fueled by reading bad French romances in worse English translations. There was a real need, and indeed there may still be a real need, to consider the dangers of instrumental reason fueled by reading realistic novels which discount the very possibility of disinterested virtue. While Lennox recognizes the dangers of unfettered fancy, she also recognizes the bad effects of human relations determined entirely by calculation. That is why her novel ends not simply with a reformed Arabella, but with a heroine who is an amalgam of novel rationality and romance sentiment. If she has settled for marriage, she has not extinguished the source of “every virtue and laudable affectation of the mind,” which we hear informs that marriage.
In my presentation, I will succinctly lay out the stakes of our understanding of The Female Quixote in terms of genre and gender and support my claims with close readings of two key passages in the novel. Next, I will briefly consider the larger implications of the understanding of desire endorsed here by Lennox. Arabella’s journey from Quixote to wife is not as straightforward as it might initially seem, and neither are Lennox’s purposes in writing this novel.
I argue that The Female Quixote is actually a warning about understanding human motivation in the way that realistic novels require their readers to do. Lennox’s novel has long been recognized as an intervention on genre and gender, but the intervention is usually framed as happening between femininity and romance fiction. Arabella, whose head has been turned by romance, is not simply a confused Quixote. She is also a rare repository of disinterested virtue. By presenting calculating self interest in the voice of the narrator and the character of Charlotte Glanville, Lennox focuses attention not on the dangerously sentimental romance, but on the dangerously instrumental novel. Critical misunderstanding of the novel’s main character, particularly of her conversion at the end of the novel, is an index of the power of the novel genre’s sway on our understanding of desire.
Freed of the assumption that the narrator unironically reports Arabella’s reality, the real target of Lennox’s satire becomes apparent. By the middle of the eighteenth century, there was no real need to warn impressionable young women about the dangers of fancy fueled by reading bad French romances in worse English translations. There was a real need, and indeed there may still be a real need, to consider the dangers of instrumental reason fueled by reading realistic novels which discount the very possibility of disinterested virtue. While Lennox recognizes the dangers of unfettered fancy, she also recognizes the bad effects of human relations determined entirely by calculation. That is why her novel ends not simply with a reformed Arabella, but with a heroine who is an amalgam of novel rationality and romance sentiment. If she has settled for marriage, she has not extinguished the source of “every virtue and laudable affectation of the mind,” which we hear informs that marriage.
In my presentation, I will succinctly lay out the stakes of our understanding of The Female Quixote in terms of genre and gender and support my claims with close readings of two key passages in the novel. Next, I will briefly consider the larger implications of the understanding of desire endorsed here by Lennox. Arabella’s journey from Quixote to wife is not as straightforward as it might initially seem, and neither are Lennox’s purposes in writing this novel.