Gothic Peregrinations

Agnieszka Łowczanin is Assistant Professor in the Department of British Literature and Culture at the University of Łódź, Poland, where she teaches courses on British literature, culture and history.. Her main areas of academic interest are the diversities and paradoxes of the eighteenth century and the potentialities of Gothic aesthetics in literature and film. She coedited a volume of critical essays, All that Gothic (2014), and published numerous articles on various aspects of the Gothic. Her monograph A Dark Tranfusion: The Polish Literary Response to Early English Gothic is going to be published in 2018. Katarzyna Małecka is Assistant Professor and Chair of the English Department at the University of Social Sciences, Łódź, Poland, where she teaches courses on American literature and culture. Her main areas of research are death and grief in American poetry and life writing. She is the author of Death in the Works of Galway Kinnell (Cambria Press, 2008) as well as of numerous articles on death and grief in literature and culture. She has been awarded the Fulbright Senior Award Scholarship for the 2017/2018 academic year to work on a research project at the University of Memphis, Tennessee, focusing on the use of modern bereavement memoirs in grief therapy. Currently, she is working on a book analyzing the social, cultural, and therapeutic characteristics and applications of modern bereavement memoirs.

List of Contents

I. The Gothic Mystique:

Matriarchy, Patriarchy, and the (Fe)Male Condition






Agnieszka Łowczanin
"A Romance Fit for the Taste of our Era": Anna Mostowska and the first Polish Gothic stories.




Adriana Raducanu
Under the Sign of Gothic: The Goddess Kālī from Mahābhārata to Marguerite Yourcenar’s “Kali Beheaded”




Dorota Filipczak
The Gothic Excess in "The Albanian Virgin" by Alice Munro Read Against The Broken April by Ismail Kadare




Marta Goszczyńska
"A Play of Fear and Laughter": Gothic Excesses in A.S. Byatt’s Possession



II. Look Now: Gothic in Film




Dorota Babilas
Monstrosity and Suffering in the Roles of Lon Chaney




Raluca Andreescu
A Portrait of the Artist as a Vampire in Jim Jarmusch’s Only Lovers Left Alive



III. Little Ones Love to Be Afraid




Sandra Mills
Grotesque Creations: Brutality, Terror and the Puppet Pinocchio




Aleskandra Mochocka
Gothic, Commodities, and Culture: the Monster High Franchise and the Processes of Incorporation and Excorporation

IV. Gothic Spaces




Krzysztof Majer
Disturbing "the sleep of substance": Nabokov’s and Millhauser’s Haunted Museums




Bridget Marshall
Fright Factories: Nineteenth-Century Industrial Gothic




Joanna Kokot
A Criminal Intrigue in a Gothic Scenery: Castle Skull by John Dickson Carr



V. Gothic Monstrosities




Stephen Oravec
Monstrous Educators: The Wendol of Michael Crichton’s Eaters of the Dead




Zofia Kolbuszewska
H. P. Lovecraft, Horrific Creation, and Post-humanism



VI. Transgressing Boundaries and Crossing Borders




Eva Čoupková
Gothic Elements in the Novel Valérie a týden divů by Vítězslav Nezval




Krzysztof Kosecki
Life, Politics, Science, and Art: Poe’s "Raven" and Its Re-interpretations by Sastre, Witkiewicz, and Pleijel




Katarzyna Małecka

Stranger than Fiction: Gothic Themes in Bereavement Memoirs of Spousal Loss