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