Roger Luckhurst > Quotes

“The most succssful monsters overdetermine these tansgressions to become, in Judith Halberstam's evocative phrase, 'technologies of monstrosity' that condense and process different and even contradictory anxieties about category and border. Some critics hold that the genre speaks to universal, primitive taboos about the very foundational elements of what it means to be human, yet the ebb and flow of the Gothic across the modern period invites more historical readings. Indeed, one of the princial border breaches in the Gothic is history itself- the insidious leakage of the pre-modern past into the skeptical, allegedly enlightened present. The Gothic, Robert Mighall suggests, can be thought of as a way of relating to the past and its legacies.”
― Roger Luckhurst, Late Victorian Gothic Tales

“Modern science has killed the Fantastic, and with the Fantastic, Poetry—which is also Fantasy. The last Fairy is well and truly buried—or dried, like a rare flower, between two pages of Monsieur Balzac.”
― Roger Luckhurst, Late Victorian Gothic Tales

“In the modern world, the city begins to pulse with the energy of a dynamic present, while depictions multiply of the countryside as a backwater, a place where things slow and swirl and the Old Ways linger on. Paths move outwards from the village, into the forest and further into the trackless wilderness before returning to the sketchy in-between edgelands. From there, the Gothic travels the world.”
― Roger Luckhurst, Gothic: An Illustrated History

“We can think about this in fairly abstract ways: the ghost, for instance, is structurally a stubborn trace of the past that persists into the present and demands a historical understanding if it is to be laid to rest. Similarly, Sigmund Freud defined the feeling of the uncanny as the shiver of realizing that modern reason has merely repressed rather than replaced primitive superstition. 'All supposedly educated people have ceased to believe officailly that the dead can become visible as spirits', yet Freud suspeccted that at times 'almost all of us think as savages do on this topic.' This return to pre-modern beliefs was itself the product of thinking of human subjectivity as a history of developmental layers that could be stripped away in an instant of dread, returning us to a 'savage' state.”
― Roger Luckhurst, Late Victorian Gothic Tales

“The Gothic repeatedly stages moments of transgression because it is obsessed with establishing and policing borders, delineating strict categories of being. The enduring icons of the Gothic are entities that breach the absolute distinctions between life and death (ghosts, vampires, mummies, zombies, Frankenstein's creature) or between human and beast (werewolves and other animalistic regressions, the creatures spliced together by Dr. Moreau) or which threaten the integrity of the individual ego and the exercise of will by merging with another (Jeckyll and Hyde, the persecuting double, the Mesmerist who holds victims in his or her power). Ostensibly, conclusions reinstate fixed borders, re-secure autonomy, and destroy any intolerable occupants of these twilight zones.”
― Roger Luckhurst, Late Victorian Gothic Tales