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5 Undying histories

Washington Irving’s Gothic afterlives

Abstract

This chapter examines Irving’s 1824 story The Adventure of the German Student alongside his two earlier tales,The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Rip Van Winkle, focusing on Irving’s radical rethinking of the historical tale as a site of ghostly returns. The presence of death and ghostly figures at the heart of foundational historical moments makes the telling and retelling of the historical tale a fraught endeavour. Irving’s seemingly harmless ‘ghost stories’ are in effect radical reinventions of ‘History’ as a constant problem to be grappled with in the here and now. In The Adventure of the German Student, the figure of the guillotine offers a prime symbol for this deathly presence at the heart of the historical event, casting it as always already horrific and showcasing History’s deadly and beheading forces at work on the individual and the collective alike.

Abstract

This chapter examines Irving’s 1824 story The Adventure of the German Student alongside his two earlier tales,The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Rip Van Winkle, focusing on Irving’s radical rethinking of the historical tale as a site of ghostly returns. The presence of death and ghostly figures at the heart of foundational historical moments makes the telling and retelling of the historical tale a fraught endeavour. Irving’s seemingly harmless ‘ghost stories’ are in effect radical reinventions of ‘History’ as a constant problem to be grappled with in the here and now. In The Adventure of the German Student, the figure of the guillotine offers a prime symbol for this deathly presence at the heart of the historical event, casting it as always already horrific and showcasing History’s deadly and beheading forces at work on the individual and the collective alike.

Chapters in this book

  1. Front matter i
  2. Contents v
  3. List of figures viii
  4. List of contributors ix
  5. Series editor’s preface xiv
  6. Acknowledgements xvi
  7. Introduction – the corpse in the closet 1
  8. Part I Gothic graveyards and afterlives
  9. 1 Past, present, and future in the Gothic graveyard 21
  10. 2 ‘On the very Verge of legitimate Invention’ 34
  11. 3 Entranced by death 48
  12. Part II Gothic revolutions and undead histories
  13. 4 ‘This dreadful machine’ 63
  14. 5 Undying histories 76
  15. 6 Deadly interrogations 88
  16. Part III Gothic apocalypses: dead selves/dead civilizations
  17. 7 The annihilation of self and species 103
  18. 8 Death cults in Gothic ‘Lost World’ fiction 116
  19. 9 Dead again 130
  20. Part IV Global Gothic dead
  21. 10 A double dose of death in Iginio Ugo Tarchetti’s ‘I fatali’ 145
  22. 11 Through the opaque veil 157
  23. 12 Afterdeath and the Bollywood Gothic noir 174
  24. Part V Twenty-first-century Gothic and death
  25. 13 Dead and ghostly children in contemporary literature for young people 191
  26. 14 Modernity’s fatal addictions 204
  27. 15 ‘I’m not in that thing you know ... I’m remote. I’m in the cloud’ 218
  28. Index 233
The Gothic and death
This chapter is in the book The Gothic and death
https://doi.org/10.7765/9781526107916.00014

Chapters in this book

  1. Front matter i
  2. Contents v
  3. List of figures viii
  4. List of contributors ix
  5. Series editor’s preface xiv
  6. Acknowledgements xvi
  7. Introduction – the corpse in the closet 1
  8. Part I Gothic graveyards and afterlives
  9. 1 Past, present, and future in the Gothic graveyard 21
  10. 2 ‘On the very Verge of legitimate Invention’ 34
  11. 3 Entranced by death 48
  12. Part II Gothic revolutions and undead histories
  13. 4 ‘This dreadful machine’ 63
  14. 5 Undying histories 76
  15. 6 Deadly interrogations 88
  16. Part III Gothic apocalypses: dead selves/dead civilizations
  17. 7 The annihilation of self and species 103
  18. 8 Death cults in Gothic ‘Lost World’ fiction 116
  19. 9 Dead again 130
  20. Part IV Global Gothic dead
  21. 10 A double dose of death in Iginio Ugo Tarchetti’s ‘I fatali’ 145
  22. 11 Through the opaque veil 157
  23. 12 Afterdeath and the Bollywood Gothic noir 174
  24. Part V Twenty-first-century Gothic and death
  25. 13 Dead and ghostly children in contemporary literature for young people 191
  26. 14 Modernity’s fatal addictions 204
  27. 15 ‘I’m not in that thing you know ... I’m remote. I’m in the cloud’ 218
  28. Index 233
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