Serial Experiments in Popular Culture: The Resignification of Gothic Symbology in Anita Blake Vampire Hunter and the Twilight Series

Abstract

I ntrinsically polysemous in nature , the Gothic, throughout its many cultural incarnations, has remained one of those chameleon ideas, which, to all intents and purposes, must always be explained in order to acquire meaning. Gothic speaks to us through the ages in voices that are inherently evanescent, yet scriptable; it exceeds the laws of one single generic code and instead warrants easy absorption into a multitude of historical genres. “There is no point,” then, as Victor Sage and Allan Lloyd Smith point out, “in thinking of the Gothic as ‘pure’; it is an apparent genre-badge, which, the moment it is worn by a text, becomes an imperceptible catalyst, a transforming agent for other codes.” 1 For the purpose of this chapter, I am keen to put forward an understanding of the Gothic as liminal discourse—that is, a discourse motivated by barriers, boundaries, and limitations. This conception is, of course, not entirely novel. Fred Botting has famously evaluated the Gothic in terms of its “fascination with transgression and the anxiety over cultural limits and boundaries.” 2 Put simply, Gothic depends on the existence of boundaries, distinguishing the natural from the unnatural world, the Self from the Other; Gothic fear, in its turn, depends on the breach of boundaries or the threat of such a violation. The Gothic play of entrapment—being denied points of access and exit—and of excess—pushing beyond the limits of what we know and are—signifies a powerful discourse of ambivalence that resonates among a multitude of genres and media. This piece investigates intersections between the Gothic and several conspicuously successful pop culture series of the 1990s and the 2000s, particularly Laurell K. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 4 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.