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Genealogies of the Early Gothic: Forging Authenticity
- from I - Medievalism and Authenticity
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- By Nickolas Haydock, Professor of English at the University of Puerto Rico, Mayagüez, where he teaches courses in medieval and early modern literature, film, and critical theory.
- Edited by Karl Fugelso
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- Book:
- Studies in Medievalism XXVII
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 05 May 2018
- Print publication:
- 17 May 2018, pp 13-22
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Summary
Controversies over the authenticity of medievalism were probably most intense and formative in the late eighteenth century. The early Gothic novel emerges during this period, a substantially new genre that rivaled neoclassical tastes and prescriptions in provocative ways. In this essay I trace some of the ways the Gothic responded to its own questionable legitimacy as a new genre. The OED lists four definitions for authenticity, an abstract noun formed in the eighteenth century from the adjective authentic. All four definitions are relevant to my analysis of Gothic authenticities below: 1. True or in accordance with fact; veracity; correctness; 2. Authoritative or duly authorized; authority (now rare); 3. With reference to a document, artifact, artwork, etc.: the fact or quality of being authentic; genuineness; 4. The fact or quality of being real; actuality, reality. My argument attempts to demonstrate the depth and breadth of Gothic engagements with authenticity through an analysis of mimesis, authority, and nationalist literary history. Early Gothic novels such as Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto, Matthew Lewis's The Monk, and Charles Maturin's Melmoth the Wanderer make profound investments in the literary authority of earlymodern writers. They also invest in iconophobic, anti-Catholic polemics that were a distinctive feature of John Foxe's Protestant martyrs to the Inquisition, Edmund Spenser's fairyland, and Christopher Marlowe's Faust. As we shall see, one of the darkest sides of this cultural inheritance – the Spanish Black Legend – also makes a deep impression on the Early Gothic.
Walpole, inventor of the Gothic novel in The Castle of Otranto (1764), exemplifies the first definition of authenticity (“true, in accordance with fact”) in his Anecdotes of Painting in England (1760): “The portrait was rather a work of command and imagination than of authenticity.” Perhaps not coincidentally, the authenticity of likenesses (in this sense) is crucial to the anamorphic portraits of Gothic fiction. The hero of Otranto, Theodore, bears an uncanny resemblance to the portrait of Alfonso the Good, a dead hero of the Crusades whose ghost steps through the frame to taunt and haunt the usurper, Manfred.
Meat Puzzles: Beowulf and Horror Film
- from II - Interpretations
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- By Nickolas Haydock, University of Puerto Rico
- Edited by Karl Fugelso, Professor of Art History at Towson University in Baltimore, Maryland
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- Book:
- Studies in Medievalism XXIII
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 05 May 2014
- Print publication:
- 21 August 2014, pp 123-146
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Summary
What would an ocean be without a monster lurking in the dark?
It would be like sleep without dreams.
(Werner Herzog)Brought face to face at last with her monstrous antagonist, the redoubtable Ripley of Alien 3 (1992) shivers in disgust as viscous drool oozes from the xenomorph's lipless mouth. In a comparatively restrained image from The Silence of the Lambs (1991), Hannibal the Cannibal Lector noisily sucks saliva through his teeth, describing with relish how he once ate a census taker's liver, “with fava beans and a nice chianti.” These images seethe with the horror film's voracious appetite for terror and revulsion, its slavering abjectness. No surprise at all, then, to find Wealhtheow falling victim to goo dripping from Grendel's lopsided maw in the 2007 Beowulf. In Outlander (2008), the warrior-princess Freya suffers a similar breach of bodily containment when the creature's saliva slops down onto her face as she lies upon a hill of human meat. An unacknowledged Beowulf analogue from the 1970s bears the delicate title Raw Meat (1973), wherein the lone descendant of a band of cannibals lives with his pregnant paramour in a tunnel beneath the London tube. The night stalker raids the tubes above to feed his family, desperate to carry on his line. His single weak spot is a livid, swollen ear, which a potential victim strikes in order to incapacitate him, releasing a stream of gore — an idea deliberately echoed in the hero's fight with Grendel in Robert Zemeckis’ Beowulf (2007).
Film Theory, the Sister Arts Tradition, and the Cinematic Beowulf
- from II - Interpretations
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- By Nickolas Haydock, University of Puerto Rico (Mayagüez Campus)
- Edited by Karl Fugelso, Professor of Art History at Towson University in Baltimore, Maryland
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- Book:
- Studies in Medievalism XXII
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 05 July 2013
- Print publication:
- 18 July 2013, pp 153-180
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Summary
This essay contributes to a larger discussion on the relationships between medieval studies and medievalism that has occupied an increasing number of scholars in recent years. Concerning the sub-field of movie medievalism, how can we put into productive relation the all-too-obviously disparate projects of writing a critical essay on Beowulf and adapting the poem for the silver screen? This essay revisits the question of homologies between scholarly and cinematic approaches to Beowulf by posing the question in another register – that of inter-media comparisons as informed by what is commonly known as “the Sister Arts Tradition.” My working thesis is simply this: inter-arts comparisons occupy the borderland between these two different realms, where the crossovers and continuities between traditional scholarship and movie medievalism are most readily apparent. Such a project offers an example of how scholars of medievalism might begin to move beyond the parochial tendencies of a sub-discipline – one that typically overemphasizes medievalism's exotic, egregious departures from original sources – into a more open, level field of play. Specifically, I provide evidence of interactions between scholarship and popular culture that are anything but one-sided or unidirectional; rather, scholarship can be seen taking its cues from cinema, and cinema decoding scholarly approaches to texts and then encoding them in nuanced, subtle ways. Such filiations between scholarship and popular filmmaking have not always been registered by academics who tend to focus on dialogue and plot to the virtual exclusion of any concern with how images and their collocations function in film.
Medievalism and Excluded Middles
- from I - Defining Medievalism(s) II: Some More Perspective(s)
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- By Nickolas Haydock, University of Puerto Rico
- Edited by Karl Fugelso
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- Book:
- Studies in Medievalism XVIII
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 12 September 2012
- Print publication:
- 19 November 2009, pp 17-30
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In an uncharacteristic breach of Aristotelian ordo, Umberto Eco remarked that before we can speak about medievalism we have the “cultural duty” first to specify what kind of medievalism we're talking about. Of course this puts the cart in front of the horse, the species ahead of the genus: before we identify sub-categories of medievalism we first need to define medievalism itself – something Eco's famous essay “Dreaming of the Middle Ages” never does. Without delimiting the genus we run the risk – as indeed has tended to occur, in part because of the popularity of Eco's piece – of multiplying subcategories willy-nilly and failing to exclude what doesn't fit within the general definition or neglecting to revise this definition to bring wayward sub-categories into the fold. For me, central to any definition of medievalism should be the concepts of alterity and continuity, each the product of a complex array of contingencies. Such contingencies include medium and genre-specific influences (e.g., the historical novel or action-adventure films, church ornaments or popular music), as well as those contingencies brought to bear by the particular time, place, and situation of a maker and particular audiences. Indeed, adjectives or substantives qualifying the noun medievalism offered as sub-categories often represent attempts to identify just such contingencies: romantic medievalism, futurist, New Age, or postmodern medievalism, Spenserian medievalism, the medievalism of Alfred Lord Tennyson or T. S. Eliot, J. R. R. Tolkien or Seamus Heaney.
Arthurian Melodrama, Chaucerian Spectacle, and the Waywardness of Cinematic Pastiche in First Knight and A Knight's Tale
- Edited by Tom Shippey, Martin Arnold
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- Book:
- Studies in Medievalism XII
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 17 March 2023
- Print publication:
- 23 January 2003, pp 5-38
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Summary
If they met aboard some unidentified flying object near Montaillou, would Darth Vader, Jacques Fornier, and Parsifal speak the same language? If so, would it be a galactic pidgin or the Latin of the Gospel according to St. Luke Skywalker?
(Umberto Eco, “Dreaming of the Middle Ages”)
An art not systematic but additive and compositive, ours and that of the Middle Ages.
(Umberto Eco, “Living in the New Middle Ages”)
“That medieval style offends me, it is all artifice. What is it that you painters say? Pasticcio. It is all pasticcio… “It must be real,” she went on. “What is the reason for the imitation of an imitation?”
(Peter Ackroyd, Chatterton)
This essay explores certain broad analogies in the medievalism of American popular cinema during the past six years, focusing primarily on First Knight (1995) and A Knight's Tale (2001). Both movies flaunt anachronism, designed not to render faithfully their respective sources in Malory or Chaucer, but rather to appeal to a cinematic imaginary about the Middle Ages, composed of bits and pieces drawn from film history and popular culture. The postmodern call to revisit the past with a mixture of nostalgia and irony is answered in such films by deploying the “prior textualization” of the cinematic history of the “Middle Ages” as pastiche. First Knight reimagines Arthurian courtly romance as an amalgam of feudal horse opera and Hollywood melodrama. A Knight's Tale recreates fourteenth century England as a Debordian society of the spectacle where jousting is an X-treme sport.
What is by turns engaging and infuriating about both films is their postmodern ontology: Exactly what worlds are these? The two quotes by Umberto Eco above reflect our mixed emotions about the medievalismby- collage of such movies. We distrust the depthlessness of pastiche and yet recognize that the anachronistic, agglutinative representation of the past in Helgeland's A Knight's Tale may be closer to the poetics of Chaucer's The Knight's Tale than we would comfortably admit. Likewise, the nostalgic eclecticism of First Knight is, mutatis mutandis, a salient feature of many medieval romances. Yet if both films flaunt the wild conglomerations of postmodernism, they do not share its suspicion of meta-narratives. First Knight rewrites the Day of Doom as a Hollywood happy ending, a smooth translatio imperii where Camelot never falls and Excalibur passes from the notably British Connery to the notably American Gere.