#the romantic agony

[chthonic-cassandra]

An anonymous individual asked @awildwickedslip for recommendations of literary criticism on the gothic, and she directed them to me, so I thought it was time I make a rec list on the topic.

I'm keep this to more general analyses, but of course have a lot of recommendations for more works on more specific texts (especially but not limited to Dracula).

I'm also including some things that are more properly about amatory or epistolary fiction, because I think an understanding of those genres will serve you well in contemplating the gothic.

Mario Praz, The Romantic Agony

Nina Auerbach, Our Vampires, Ourselves

Christy Desmet and Anne Williams (eds), Shakespearean Gothic

Kate Ferguson Ellis, The Contested Castle

David J. Skal, The Monster Show: A Cultural History of Horror

Devendra P. Varma, The Gothic Flame

Angela Carter, The Sadeian Woman

Roland Barthes, Sade, Fourier, Loyola

Elizabeth Cook, Epistolary Bodies

Jacqueline Howard, Readng Gothic Fiction: A Bakhtinian Approach

Toni Bowers, Force or Fraud: British Seduction Stories and the Problem of Resistance

Peter Cryle, The Telling of the Act: Sexuality as Narrative in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century France

Peter Cryle, Geometry in the Budoir: Configurations of French Erotic Narrative

Jalal Toufic, Vampire: An Uneasy Essay on the Undead in Film

Ruth Bernard Yeazell, Harems of the Mind: Passages of Western Art and Literature

Marianne Noble, The Masochistic Pleasures of Sentimental Literature

Terry Castle, The Female Thermometer: Eighteenth Century Literature and the Invention of the Uncanny

[saintacephale]

Farida Khelfa in The Agony of Marguerite Gautier by Jean-Paul Goude, 1992

[thegirlthatcriesacademia]

Jane Austen was right when she said “I am half agony, half hope.”

[wordsinhaled]

Edwin holding both of Charles' hands in his and telling him, "You cannot hurt me in any way that matters."

"I have been hurt beyond imagining and you have witnessed it firsthand, Charles. Do you remember it, as I remember it—clear as day? That was the worst agony imaginable. Unspeakable. Insurmountable. And you were wounded tenfold at the sight of it. You cannot hurt me in a way I will ever hold against you. And moreover you will not. No—don't look at me like that—I know you will not. Because you would sooner destroy yourself than cause me an iota of intentional pain. Your soul revolts against the thought of hurting me, does it not? Just as mine riots against the thought of you in pain. You saved me from hell—and Charles, you must not consign yourself to one of your own for fear of hurting me. Not when I am here to love you. Our love is not without risk, Charles, but it is a risk that is worth the reward."

[normystical]

ATTENTION ALL ALASTOR SHIPPERS: 

uniromantic 

THANK YOU FOR YOUR TIME. PROCEED

[thehermitsacedia]

Le sang coule à longs flots de sa poitrine ouverte ; En vain il a des mers fouillé la profondeur ; L'océan était vide et la plage déserte ; Pour toute nourriture il apporte son cœur. […] Et, regardant couler sa sanglante mamelle, Sur son festin de mort il s'affaisse et chancelle, Ivre de volupté, de tendresse et d'horreur.

The blood runs in slow waves from his open chest In vain has he plumbed the depths of the seas The Ocean is empty and the shore deserted To provide food for all he offers his heart. […] And, watching his bloody breast drop On his death-feast he sinks and staggers Drunk on pleasure, on tenderness and horror.

-Alfred de Musset, La Nuit de Mai

[existingillusion]

[sesamestreep]

“requiem for methuselah” crazy ass episode for many reasons. Kirk is being fully insane, like I don’t actually think, even controlling for how quickly and easily and readily he seems to fall in love with anybody at the slightest encouragement, that he’d go that bonkers for that android woman he just met while everyone on the ship was this close to dying, but that’s neither here nor there, because in the background you’ve got an equally but much more subtly insane episode for Spock, who extremely uncharacteristically admits to experiencing an emotion (or nearly experiencing, whatever) and that emotion is ENVY of all things. And then spends the rest of the episode warning Kirk away from this new love interest (something that doesn’t usually happen, even when Kirk has very inadvisable love interests) and is, in the end, the person who accurately identifies that Rayna’s competing love for Kirk and Flint is ultimately what overwhelms and destroys her with the most killer line in maybe history???

And then to wrap it up we get an equally uncharacteristic sort of denouement scene (TOS loooves to cut an episode off right after the actual climax, leaving little time for falling action or character reflection, or to stick a sitcom-y button on the end where the gang all smiles and laughs at their misadventures and everything resets to zero, which is not a criticism, it’s just the style of that era of tv, honestly) where Kirk is literally miserable over Rayna’s death (again, kind of unusual for a lot of his love interests, he tends to be able to move on pretty quickly) and Spock goes to see him and he falls asleep right in front of Spock (also odd) and then when Bones comes in to give the final word on Flint, Spock waves him off from waking the Captain (tender) and Bones gives him that awful speech about how it’s sadder that Spock can’t even imagine the love Kirk felt for this random android woman than it is that Kirk lost her in the first place (debatable but also rude) and how his great tragedy is that he can’t love at all like they can and how all he wishes is that Kirk could forget about all of this and move on. AND THEN, to have Bones leave and Spock go over to Kirk and very gently, tenderly, reluctantly touch him and put his hand to his forehead and tell him to forget and HAVE THAT BE THE END OF THE EPISODE??? What am I supposed to do with that??

[robertwaltons]

behold: the doomed unrequited waltonstein manifesto courtesy of twitter user ustfile

[notverycreativeblog]

[chthonic-cassandra]

Journeys across unfamiliar countryside, spanning the hours of daylight and darkness, under the control of horsemen who know the dangers of the route are a staple of eighteenth-century Gothic. Jonathan Harker is progressively feminised whilst resident at the Count's castle, where he writes letters in the persona of a retiring damsel. This process of feminization, though, arguably begins much earlier than Simmons envisages. It is initiated during Harker's journey, where he experiences not merely a disorientation that parallels that of the abducted Gothic heroine, but much of her acute sensibility also. Dracula, in many respects, revives not merely the convention of powerless abduction but also the vigil of consciousness that characteristically accompanies it in earlier Gothic - the intensity of a gaze fixated upon sublime landscapes capable of offering up a pathetic fallacy to the elation or depression experienced by the perceiving, powerless self. The narrative of Harker's journey playfully balances his preferred (though occasionally shaky) identity as a dedicated, competent, modern professional with a more naive and curious selfhood that is frequently overawed by the novelty of his environment. If Harker is comically obsessive in his documentation of local peculiarities of cuisine and dress, he is less certain in his own personal comprehension both of an alien culture, the conventions of which he has to ascertain in imperfect English from his fellow travelers, and of a regional geography uncharted in word or image, for "I was not able to light upon any map or work giving the exact locality of the Castle Dracula."

William Hughes, "Dracula's Debts to the Gothic Romance" in The Cambridge Companion to Dracula (Roger Luckhurst, ed).

[simply-whump]

Dr Romantic 3 : Episode 10

>> Whump List

[thelonelynindroid]

Trobed I drew through genuine tears while i had a 24 hr migraine and my good old pal dys for ya 👍

[theinternationalmuseumofmyheart]

“If you must die, I envy even the earth that wraps around your body.”

- Albert Camus, state of siege

[some-pers0n]

Had my character say 1 comment about how the other was cute -500hp Had my characters partake in banter that kinda looks like flirting -250hp Had my characters say they love each other +20hp Realizing it will 100% be interpreted as romantic -5000hp

[lacnunga]

Since I bought like 1 book from hay on wye last year it seems I was intent on compensating for it this year. Behold the Haul