By Francis Booth | On July 22, 2024 | Comments (0)
Anita Loos’ wildly successful 1925 novel Gentlemen Prefer Blondes was followed by a sequel, But Gentlemen Marry Brunettes. Published in the U.S. in 1927 and in England in 1928, it continued the adventures of the free, independent but ditzy Lorelei Lee and her friend, Dorothy Shaw.
Despite her misspellings and malapropisms, Lorelei is very much the modern, free 1920s woman and though she is deliberately written to appear as a “dumb blonde,” she is actually extremely sharp (and beautifully written in a virtuoso performance by Loos). Read More→
By Evan Atlas | On February 3, 2024 | Updated April 27, 2024 | Comments (0)
Catherine and Heathcliff in the story of Wuthering Heights (1847) by Emily Brontë are unhesitatingly certain of their soul connection.
I’d venture to guess that some people who say they have identified their twin flame are experiencing some kind of unhealthy, obsessive, and delusional form of love.
However, some of them may be experiencing something closer to amigeist — an intense, perhaps spiritual, bond which tends towards the exaltation of all. There is an undecidability here which gives love both its healing touch and jagged edge. Read More→
By Francis Booth | On January 25, 2024 | Updated October 29, 2024 | Comments (0)
Asked to name uncanny authors, most readers would come up with names like Edgar Allan Poe, M.R. James, H.P. Lovecraft, Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu – all male. But a surprising number of women authors, some of whom may be better known for writing more homelike novels, also wrote very “unhomelike” short stories.
Sigmund Freud’s famous essay about weird literature is usually translated as The Uncanny. But the German word “unheimlich” literally means “unhomelike.”
No Direction Home: The Uncanny in Literature by Francis Booth (©2023, from which this essay is excerpted by permission) traces how uncanny literature takes us from the familiar, the reassuring, the homelike, into a world of the unfamiliar, the unsettling, and the unhomelike. Read More→
By Francis Booth | On January 18, 2024 | Updated March 25, 2024 | Comments (0)
A fairly common trope in uncanny stories is that of a shadow. An example of this is the short story “The Shadow in the Corner” by Mary Elizabeth Braddon (1879), a serious, if rather sensationalist, female novelist who wrote ghost stories. Braddon is most famous for the 1862 novel, Lady Audley’s Secret.
As in other such stories, one of the characters is an educated, responsible man, in this case a scientist, who seeks to disprove what he sees as local superstition. This time we start with a spooky and unhomelike old house, which is believed to be haunted by the restless spirit of a previous owner who had hanged himself in one of the top floor servants’ rooms.
This discussion is excerpted from No Direction Home: The Uncanny in Literature by Francis Booth (©2023, by permission). Read “The Shadow in the Corner” in full. Read More→
By Francis Booth | On January 16, 2024 | Updated March 25, 2024 | Comments (0)
A surprising number of women authors, some of whom may be better known for writing more homelike novels, also wrote very “unhomelike” short stories. One was Edith Wharton, who understood that before leading us into the world of the tense and unsettling, the author first has to make us feel calm and settled.
Wharton said that this can be done by starting with a modern clean, electric-lit environment at least as well as with a gloomy old castle.
Sigmund Freud’s famous essay about weird literature is usually translated as The Uncanny. But the German word “unheimlich” literally means “unhomelike.” Read More→
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