Ashleigh Prosser

This article examines Peter Ackroyd’s popular Gothic novel The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein (2008), which is a reimagining of Mary Shelley’s famous Gothic novel Frankenstein, or, The Modern Prometheus ([1818] 2003). The basic premise of Ackroyd’s narrative seemingly resembles Shelley’s own, as Victor Frankenstein woefully reflects on the events that have brought about his mysterious downfall, and like the original text the voice of the Monster interrupts his creator to recount passages from his own afterlife. However, Ackroyd’s adaption is instead set within the historical context of the original story’s creation in the early nineteenth century. Ackroyd’s Frankenstein studies at Oxford, befriends radical Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, moves to London to conduct his reanimation experiments and even accompanies the Shelleys, Byron and Polidori on that fateful holiday when the original novel was conceived. This article explores how Ackroyd’s novel, as a form of the contemporary ‘popular’ Gothic, functions as an uncanny doppelgänger of Shelley’s Frankenstein. By blurring the boundaries between history and fiction, the original text and the context of its creation haunt Ackroyd’s adaptation in uncannily doubled and self-reflexive ways that speak to Frankenstein’s legacy for the Gothic in popular culture. The dénouement of Ackroyd’s narrative reveals that the Monster is Frankenstein’s psychological doppelgänger, a projection of insanity, and thus Frankenstein himself is the Monster. This article proposes that this final twist is an uncanny reflection of the narrative’s own ‘Frankenstein-ian’ monstrous metafictional construction, for it argues that Ackroyd’s story is a ‘strange case(book)’ haunted by the ghosts of its Gothic literary predecessors.

This article seeks to explore the trope of haunting in contemporary English author Peter Ackroyd’s seventh novel The House of Doctor Dee, published in 1993. It will propose that Ackroyd’s novel is a Gothic narrative of uncanny returns, in which the spectres of the past are returned to the present through the temporal dislocation of space in the classical tradition of the ghost story, by the haunting of a house. The majority of the novel’s action is set in the house of its title, which is possessed by a mysterious history, ambiguous construction, and uncanny atmosphere. It provides the spatial medium through which the parallel narratives of the novel’s two narrators, the famous Elizabethan Doctor John Dee and the contemporary Londoner Matthew Palmer, can transhistorically haunt one another in an uncanny act that brings the dark history of the house and its inhabitants to light. This article will first consider whether the trope of the haunted house can be effectively read as a new kind of Bakhtinian literary chronotope inspired by that of the Gothic castle. It will then explore the significance of the chronotope of the haunted house in Ackroyd’s novel by employing the theory of the uncanny’s “return of the repressed”, and conclude by addressing how a chronotopic reading of the haunted house in The House of Doctor Dee reveals a ghost story that is both a modern Gothic narrative of the return of repressed trauma and a historical narrative of the visionary Gothic tradition.

This article seeks to specifically examine the ways in which the figure of the bourgeois bachelor and his construction of an alternative form of masculine domesticity in Victorian fin-de-siècle society are conveyed in Stevenson’s Gothic novella via the unhomely home space. By applying Freud’s theory of 'das unheimliche' (the uncanny, literally translated as ‘unhomely’) to a close reading of the text, this paper seeks to identify moments of the unhomely within the home and read them as spaces through which the bourgeois bachelor’s alternative form of masculine domesticity at the fin-de-siècle can be understood. This interpretation of Stevenson’s text is founded on reading the unhomely home as a literary chronotope, a symbolic representation of the experience of masculine domesticity within a specific moment in time, the Victorian fin de siècle, through a specific space, the bourgeois bachelor’s home.

In April 2013, Robert Wood and Ashleigh Prosser interviewed Dr Ben Etherington, a Research Lecturer in English, Text and Writing at the University of Western Sydney. Dr Etherington’s work focuses on decolonization and the emergence of literary materials and communities before, during and after that process. With these interests his work intersects with Literary Theory, Intellectual History, and World Philosophy. In this interview, Dr Etherington discusses a range of subjects. Among other topics he shares with us his current understanding and future expectations for higher education in Australia and the UK, where he undertook his doctoral studies; the tension between publishing and teaching; and the relationship of the university to other forms of communication and education. Undoubtedly, this interview will be of interest to postgraduates seeking a career in the academy and those interested in the politics of the tertiary sector.