Reading the Gothic and Gothic readers

Type:

Book Chapter

Author:

Andrew Smith

Published:

2017

Publisher:

Manchester University Press

In ‘Reading the Gothic and Gothic Readers’ Andrew Smith outlines how recent developments in Gothic studies have provided new ways of critically reflecting upon the nineteenth century. Smith then proceeds to explore how readers and reading, as images of self-reflection, are represented in the fin de siècle Gothic. The self-reflexive nature of the late nineteenth-century Gothic demonstrates a level of political and cultural scepticism at work in the period which, Smith argues, can be applied to recent developments in animal studies as a hitherto largely overlooked critical paradigm that can be applied to the Gothic. To that end this chapter examines representations of reading, readers, and implied readers in Arthur Machen’s <italic>The Great God Pan</italic> (1894), Bram Stoker’s <italic>Dracula</italic> (1897), and Arthur Conan Doyle’s <italic>The Hound of the Baskervilles</italic> (1902), focusing on how these representations explore the relationship between the human and the non-human. An extended account of <italic>Dracula</italic> identifies ways in which these images of self-reflection relate to the presence of the inner animal and more widely the chapter argues for a way of rethinking the period within the context of animal studies via these ostensibly Gothic constructions of human and animal identities.

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