ENGL 3340 Lecture Notes - Lecture 14: Animal Magnetism, Masculinity, Male Unemployment
Document Summary
W8: imperial gothic & richard marsh"s the beetle. Created huge anxiety about imperial power and people trying to imagine what the fall of the empire might look like. This genre was called the imperial gothic. Brantlinger 3 principal themes of imperial gothic: i. Individual regression / going native in the contact zone. Fear of white men sleeping with indigenous women ii. Threatening other that poses a threat to invading the metropole: diminution of opportunities for adventurism / heroism. New places in fictions become imagined to invent others: threat of reverse colonization, narration, truth, and detection. How does the novel ask its readers to think about the concept of truth: science & technology, the new woman. Women were starting to come into the workforce and replace men in roles that were traditionally held by men. This made men both anxious and feeling useless. Male unemployment and poverty began being associated with the new.