![]() ![]() ![]() Wisker then addresses several of Carter's major works, analyzing them in detail to expose the nuances of their tropes and the incendiary actions of the women in her tales. The next chapter focuses on Angela Carter, whom the author credits as ‘the most thoroughgoing and influential’ revivalist of the contemporary Gothic revolution, and does not shy away from anything, embracing every taboo, including pornography, to highlight the sexist narratives of the past with a fresh, if often dark, feminist view. Wisker adds to the academic discourse surrounding classic Gothic literature. This section concludes by pointing out the elements of rebellion and resistance, calling contemporary Gothic fiction ‘he subversive granddaughter of eighteenth-century Gothic fiction’ (27). Wisker describes the ways in which the characters in these stories often subvert common tropes such as the trapped woman, twinning, othering, and body as object. Contemporary Gothic fiction examines the tropes of the classics and often turns them on their heads. The introduction discusses the purpose behind this book and Wisker's desire to examine ‘the contradictions and the richness of ways in which contemporary women writers use the opportunities afforded by the Gothic to engage with culture, imagination and their arguments’ (1). What hidden, unsettling, uncanny, and disturbed notions lie just under the surface, waiting to be discovered while we play at calmness and stability? As Wisker states, ‘Simultaneously, it has a radical aesthetically inventive edge which problematises ways in which women are represented, controlled and considered in contemporary society’ (5). Contemporary women write Gothic literature to reexamine the world around them and retake control of the narrative. Women hold a different perception of fear in society because women's bodies and autonomy are often threatened in ways men are not. There is a disruptive nature in the Gothic that lends itself to the exploration of the nuances of perceived normative daily life, especially for women. She seeks to connect critiques and perspectives held by feminists with the ways and reasons in which contemporary women write the Gothic. Wisker argues that contemporary Gothic has ‘made horror respectable,’ in the academic and critical spheres by combining ‘the edgy enlightenment of queer theory, and postcolonialism, with multiple perspectives and angles of diversity of origin, sexuality and culture ’ (1). This celebration of the revival of women's Gothic literature seeks to explain how these authors use the Gothic to cope with the ‘otherness,’ with the dark and hidden world that often lurks beneath the surface of the everyday. The omnipresence of the Gothic is the starting-point for Gina Wisker's Contemporary Women's Gothic Fiction. ![]()
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