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A Dark and Stormy Oeuvre

Author: David Huckvale

Publisher: McFarland

Published: 2015-12-11

Total Pages: 264

ISBN-13: 1476622795

Edward Bulwer-Lytton--who coined the terms "the great unwashed" and "the pen is mightier than the sword"--is best remembered for persuading Dickens to change the ending of Great Expectations; but Lord Lytton was a prolific and influential novelist in his own right, inspiring Edgar Allan Poe, H. Rider Haggard and Madame Blavatsky, among others. His radicalism was applauded by William Godwin, the father of both Mary Shelley and the anarchist movement, and his ideas about power foreshadowed those of Friedrich Nietzsche. Fascinated by crime, Bulwer-Lytton was an outspoken critic of his society, both in his novels and throughout his political career. Equally fascinated by paranormal phenomena, he wrote two of the most important occult fantasies in English literature and set the agenda of the Society for Psychical Research. His historical romance The Last Days of Pompeii has inspired several movies and a star-studded television series, while his stately home at Knebworth has provided brooding Gothic backdrops for many other films. This book covers Bulwer-Lytton's novels in detail, exploring their influence on writers and film makers and, via Richard Wagner's operatic adaptation of Rienzi, the catastrophe of Adolf Hitler.

Dirk Bogarde

Author: David Huckvale

Publisher: McFarland

Published: 2019-10-22

Total Pages: 200

ISBN-13: 1476678030

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English actor Dirk Bogarde dominated the films in which he starred. Exploring the tension between his matinee idol appeal and his own closeted sexuality, this book focuses on the wide variety of genres in which he worked, and the highly charged interaction between his life and his roles. Beginning with an expose of gay life in post-war Britain and his relationship with partner/manager, Anthony Forwood, each chapter explores Bogarde's performances by genre--his juvenile delinquent movies, his military roles, his contribution to Basil Dearden's overtly gay thriller Victim (1961), and his "outsider" roles in such films as The Servant (1963), The Fixer (1968) and Despair (1978). Bogarde's "camp" cinema, espionage thrillers and various roles as artists are also examined, along with the misogyny of the Doctor films and his later television work.

Taxidermy and the Gothic

Author: Elizabeth Effinger

Publisher: Anthem Press

Published: 2024-06-04

Total Pages: 171

ISBN-13: 1839986018

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Taxidermy and the Gothic: The Horror of Still Life is the first extended study of the Gothic’s collusion with taxidermy. It tells the story of the emergence in the long nineteenth century of the twin golden ages of the Gothic genre and the practice of taxidermy, and their shared rhetorical and narratological strategies, anxieties, and sensibilities. It follows the thread into twentieth- and twenty-first-century culture, including recent horror film, fiction, television, and visual arts to argue that the Gothic and taxidermy are two discursive bodies, stuffed and stitched together. Moving beyond the well-worn path that treats taxidermy as a sentimental art or art of mourning, this book takes readers down a new dark trail, finding an overlooked but rich tradition in the Gothic that aligns it with the affective and corporeal work of horror and the unsettling aesthetics, experiences, and pleasures that come with it. Over the course of four chapters, it argues that in addition to entwined origins, taxidermy’s uncanny appearance in Gothic and horror texts is a driving force in generating fear. For taxidermy embodies the phenomenological horror of stuckness, of being there. In sum, taxidermy’s imbrication with the Gothic is more than skin deep: these are rich discourses stuffed by affinities for corporeal transgressions, the uncanny, and the counterfeit.

The Piano on Film

Author: David Huckvale

Publisher: McFarland

Published: 2022-02-22

Total Pages: 221

ISBN-13: 1476643881

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Since the early days of silent film accompaniment, the piano has played an integral part in the history of cinema. Film's fascination with the piano, both in soundtracks and onscreen as a status symbol and icon of popular romanticism, offers a revealing opportunity to chart the changing perception of the instrument. From Mozart to Elton John, this book surveys the cultural history of the piano through the instrument's cinematic functions. Composer biopics, such as A Song to Remember, romantic melodramas like the Liberace vehicle Sincerely Yours, and horror films such as The Hands of Orlac, along with animated cartoons featuring Bugs Bunny and Tom and Jerry demonstrate just how pervasive the cinematic image of the piano once was during a period when the piano itself began its noticeable decline in everyday life. By examining these depictions of the piano onscreen, readers will begin to understand not only the decline of the piano but also the decline of the idealistic culture to which it gave birth in the nineteenth century.

Terrors of the Flesh

Author: David Huckvale

Publisher: McFarland

Published: 2020-07-17

Total Pages: 197

ISBN-13: 1476640785

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The horror and psychological denial of our mortality, along with the corruptibility of our flesh, are persistent themes in drama. Body horror films have intensified these themes in increasingly graphic terms. The aesthetic of body horror has its origins in the ideas of the Marquis de Sade and the existential philosophies of Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche, all of whom demonstrated that we have just cause to be anxious about our physical reality and its existence in the world. This book examines the relationship between these writers and the various manifestations of body horror in film. The most characteristic examples of this genre are those directed by David Cronenberg, but body horror as a whole includes many variations on the theme by other figures, whose work is charted here through eight categories: copulation, generation, digestion, mutilation, infection, mutation, disintegration and extinction.