On The Backward Gaze
Susan Felch’s “The Backward Gaze,” puts forth a vision of editorial scholarship in which a text is “always a prism that refracts light” (21). Because...
What does it mean to be ‘an unnecessary woman’?
The aspect of Rabih Almeddine’s An Unnecessary Woman: A Novel (2014) that most powerfully strikes me is the seamless movement across time, across micro places...
What does it mean to not have a history? Alejandro Zambra’s ‘Ways of Going Home’
Names, or lack or inappropriateness thereof, are a ghostly presence in Alejandro Zambra’s characterization of the macro- and micro-level themes expertly tangled in his novel...
Madwomen in Northanger Abbey and Frankenstein
Gilbert and Gubar’s feminist examination of female-authored literature, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (1979), draws its title...
Sublime v. Human Gothic Villains
The trope of the Gothic villain ranges from the most explicit—arguably Ann Radcliffe’s Schedoni, the ultimate personification of the Gothic sublime that she articulates in...