Stephanie Ruth Green

Desiring Dexter: The pangs and pleasures of serial killer body technique

The television series Dexter uses the figure of appealing monstrosity to unfold troubled relationships between corporeality, spectatorship, and desire. Through a plastic-wrapped display of body horror, lightly veiled by suburban romance, Dexter turns its audience on to the consuming sensations of blood, death, and dismemberment while simultaneously alluding to its own narrative and ethical contradictions. The excitations of Dexter are thus encapsulated within a tension between form and content as ambivalent and eroticized desire; both for heroic transgression and narrative resolution. Arguably, however, it is Dexters execution of a carefully developed serial killer body technique which makes this series so compelling. Through an examination of Dexter and his plotted body moves, this paper explores the representations of intimacy and murderous identity in this contemporary example of domestic screen horror entertainment.

The Public Life of Charlotte Carmichael Stopes

ABSTRACT This discussion explores some of the ways in which historical narratives can emerge from gaps in the evidence and in our ways of thinking about the past, with reference to the writer, feminist activist and Shakespearean scholar, Charlotte Carmichael Stopes (1841–1929). A considerable body of manuscript and other archival material relating to the Stopes family is held in public hands. However, key items, including Charlotte Stopess own correspondence with prominent people of her time, have been lost or destroyed. This article aims to address the tensions between private and public aspects of Stopess life as a way of exploring ways in which the absence, as well as the presence, of evidence can influence historical accounts. As the discussion sets out to show with reference to Stopes, historical attention may be drawn to certain kinds of evidence in accordance with dominant cultural narratives, allowing these narratives to be repeatedly rehearsed across generations of scholarship. This process may then produce a discursive gap, a failure to recognize marginal or unfashionable contributions to public culture, which in turn produces distortions in the record of the past.

Inclusions and Exclusions: considerations for a Stopes digital collection

ABSTRACT Investigating a body of archival manuscript research in any field can be a daunting undertaking, particularly when the relevant primary sources are scattered amongst a variety of public and private locations. The creation of a digital collection of privately held manuscripts and minutiae offers a boon to researchers who would otherwise be obliged to travel extensively. The digital collection can provide a means of transcending the boundary between private and public access, ensuring that crucial material evidence is available in the public domain. The author argues that the interpolation of personal archival materials within the context of the digital public sphere offers a mechanism for investigating sites of knowledge that may otherwise be obscured from history. In the context of womens historical studies, the digital collection offers a means of addressing the Victorian convention of a gendered boundary between private and public spheres. It can achieve this by making previously inaccessible cultural materials available for study and bringing to light work produced by figures who were not already well known. More significantly, it can support further investigation of the complex ways in which women and men were represented as public personae during the late-Victorian and Edwardian periods. This will be discussed with reference to archival material concerning Charlotte Carmichael Stopes and other prominent members of her family, suggesting that the creation of a Stopes digital archive exemplifies the value of such mechanisms for further research and scholarly discourse within the context of the digital public sphere.

Hospitality, rape and consent in vampire popular culture : letting the wrong one in

This unique study explores the vampire as host and guest, captor and hostage: a perfect lover and force of seductive predation. From Dracula and Carmilla, to True Blood and The Originals, the figure of the vampire embodies taboos and desires about hospitality, rape and consent. The first section welcomes the reader into ominous spaces of home, examining the vampire through concepts of hospitality and power, the metaphor of threshold, and the blurred boundaries between visitation, invasion and confinement. Section two reflects upon the historical development of vampire narratives and the monster as oppressed, alienated Other. Section three discusses cultural anxieties of youth, (im)maturity, childhood agency, abuse and the age of consent. The final section addresses vampire as intimate partner, mapping boundaries between invitation, passion and coercion. With its fresh insight into vampire genre, this book will appeal to academics, students and general public alike.

Time and the Vampire: The Idea of the Past in Carmilla and Dracula

This chapter explores the ways in which vampires encapsulate the idea of the past by means of their ambiguous temporality. Prisoners of a past they can never escape, vampires are yet also able to transcend the tyranny of embodied decay. The vampire emerged as a figure of intimate predation in popular fiction during the mid- to late nineteenth-century, with Irish writer Sheridan Le Fanu’s novella Carmilla (1871), followed by compatriot Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897). A key representational figure for exploring the ambiguities of power, in these texts the vampire features as both predator and prey. Later nineteenth-century vampire fiction contributed to a resurgence in the literary celebrations of Gothic excess that had been published at least a century earlier by Walpole, Edgeworth and Radcliffe. With their precursors, Le Fanu and Stoker convey a spectacle of European aristocracy in decline, while also evoking the idea of the past in inherently conflicted terms. The “history” of the vampire is presented in Carmilla and Dracula through multiple perspectives and interwoven chronological shifts, through which the recountability of human adventure—inflected with modern notions of reason and scientific investigation—comes face to face with the ravages of a living supernatural past. Both hosts and hostages of ancient familial legacy, immune to decay and capable of strange reproduction through intimate conquest, as Carmilla suggests, at least in fictional terms, only the vampire bloodline never dies.

Introduction: Artful Courtship and Murderous Enjoyment

The portrayal of the vampire as host and guest is one of the most frequently rehearsed tropes of the vampire mythos. As one who stands on ceremony, the bloodsucking monster plays an intricate game of manners with the victim, often demonstrating a magnanimous hospitality to the living. As the generosity of the vampire host too often serves to shroud a threat of violation, the vampiric welcome remains intrinsically ambiguous. More terrifying, however, is the moment when the monster steps over the threshold of human settlement. Vampires have long reflected human fears of invasion—of the Other shattering the sense of shelter created by familiar spaces and values. Thus, the politics of hospitality in vampiric narratives problematises the navigation of the domestic—at once displaying and unsettling the dichotomies between tradition and transformation, radical and hegemonic identities, the consensual and non-consensual. As metaphorical invaders, vampire “guests” not only intrude the physical space of home but also violate human body. It is precisely here where the vampire figures the problematic nexus between rape and consent. In their multiple incarnations, however, vampires cannot be perceived exclusively as violators; they often themselves fall victim to human violence and abjection. Recognising the ways in which themes of domesticity, anxiety and violation intersect with vampiric narratives, this volume serves to locate the relationship between hospitality and predation, and illuminates the commodified mythos of romantic love and the socio-cultural barriers to inclusiveness and acceptance.