Volume 58, Issue 4

One of the most persistent topoi in American culture is the mystique of the frontier. From John Smith’s adventurous account of colonizing Virginia to the contemporary road movie, and from Frederick Jackson Turner’s declaration of the frontier’s closure to its revivals in Star Trek or Avatar, narratives of pioneering and conquering the ‘wilderness’ continue to serve as defining metaphors of the national imaginary. What is often left out of these tales, however, are their subtexts of terror and violence. As Richard Slotkin, David Mogen, and other critics have argued, the frontier’s implications of uncanny encounters with the Other, of existential threats and uncertain spatial orientation, have made it a suitable setting for gothic fiction - and thus also an ideal space for the negotiation of sociopolitical anxieties. In tracing precisely the connection between terror and territory from the Puritan salvation narrative to the contemporary horror film, this paper explores the multilateral reverberations of frontier gothic. With the examples of Mary Rowlandson’s captivity narrative (1682), Charles Brockden Brown’s Edgar Huntly (1799), Eduardo Sanchez’s and Daniel Myrick’s Blair Witch Project (1999), and M. Night Shyamalan’s The Village (2004), I will highlight the processes and techniques by which the semantics of the frontier is recoded along the lines of spiritual, gendered, ethnic, psychological, and - not least - narratological and aesthetic boundaries. The encounter with the Other, I am arguing, is deeply invested with alternative meanings, emphasizing ambiguity, unreliability, and the fallacies of representation. Engaging the mode of frontier terror thus significantly contributes to the Gothic literary tradition, but it also forms a powerful subtext to American historiography

In his Illuminated Books, William Blake developed a distinct artistic media practice. This practice is inseparable from Blake’s media theoretical reflections which anticipate those of Marshall McLuhan in their insistence that ‘the medium is the message.’ Jim Jarmusch’s film Dead Man (1995), a reworking of the Western genre and perhaps the most original of the many contemporary works of popular culture which reference Blake, takes up Blake’s and McLuhan’s thoughts by focusing on the violence trains, guns, watches, and factories wrought upon 1870s North America. This aspect of the film ties in with Blake’s trenchant critique of industrial capitalism and its effects on human beings. Blake’s status as a ‘Prophet against Empire’ is then taken up and related to Jarmusch’s Blake becoming a ‘Killer of white men,’ which raises urgent questions about the relationship between art and politics. Finally, the character of Thel Russell, who sells paper flowers in the film, is shown to incarnate Blake’s views on the power of the imagination and to resonate with his experience as an artist

During its history of reception, George Pal’s The Time Machine (1960) has acquired a reputation as either a largely apolitical piece of filmmaking, or as a hawkish endorsement of American Cold War prerogatives. Given its historical context, this reputation is undeserved. Within the larger framework of the Cold War, particularly in regard to historical events immediately preceding the release of the film in 1960, Pal lays out a narrative that advocates benign American intervention on behalf of recently decolonized nations at risk of being absorbed into the Soviet Union’s sphere of influence. In light of Christina Klein’s work on the internal inconsistencies and contradictions within Cold War rhetoric, Pal’s film reads differently when seen as commenting upon post-WW II decolonization rather than upon ideological, political, and military rivalry with the Soviet Union

Focussing on Toni Morrison’s Beloved this article sets out to show the possibilities magic realism offers to negotiate the difficulties of representation in narratives of trauma. In spite of the common demand for mimetic accuracy, magic realism’s potential for ethical representation lies precisely in its denial of a single coherent reading. By impelling the reader to accept the narrative’s irreducible contradictions, magic realism offers means to express the excess that marks traumatic experience. The bodily presence of the past in Beloved can therefore be read as a literal manifestation of trauma that demands a confrontation of the contradictory needs to forget and to remember. By exploiting analogies between trauma and magic, Beloved points to the ethical necessity of acknowledging the Other as Other and attempts to narrate the Other without defining and fixing it through narration itself

Bernardine Evaristo is one of the young black British writers, who entered the literary scene in the mid-nineties. By now she has published five novels. Already in her first work Lara, a novel in verse, she was concerned with history, but her interest was limited to her family saga, i.e. the stories of both her British and Nigerian ancestors. After this strongly autobiographical text Evaristo turned her interest to the wider topic of black history in Britain and Europe. She wrote revisionist historical novels, in which the resilience and creative power of blacks are celebrated. Her approach falls in with a recent general tendency in black British culture, most marked in art, to break away from the image of blacks as victims and instead to highlight their resistance and creativity. In The Emperor’s Babe (also in verse), Soul Tourists (in prose mixed with verse) and Blonde Roots (pure prose) Evaristo experimented with three different approaches to history, yet all are marked by exuberant fantasy, empathy, humour and a bold mixture of language registers. The article investigates and compares her treatment of black history in all three texts and finally discusses the question whether and, if so, in what ways her approaches seem gendered