Special Issue: by Stephanie Green
FULGOR, 2022
The television series Penny Dreadful, created by John Logan (2014-2016), uses famous supernatural... more The television series Penny Dreadful, created by John Logan (2014-2016), uses famous supernatural characters from nineteenth-century and early twentiethcentury popular fiction to evoke the idea of a haunted past as background for new stories of a world on the brink of change. In Penny Dreadful, the supernatural sufferings of Vanessa Ives (Eva Green), the shadowy predations of the witches and the revivification of Brona Croft as Lily Frankenstein (Billie Piper) echo the ways in which popular culture reacted to the transformative figure of the New Woman at a time when the Victorian Gothic had more broadly become a "site of cultural proliferation" (Murphy 2017: 6). Its stories offer a dark reflection of fin-de-siècle anxieties that construed female desire for education, professional independence and political participation as spookily degenerate or monstrous (Pykett 1992; Nelson 2000). The "Gothic New Women" of Penny Dreadful are characters with supernatural capacity who seek new possibilities for themselves and their worlds. Viscerally "made" from their experiences, often at the hands of dominating or ruthless males, they wrestle with incursions into and limits on their autonomy and power, whether through enchantment or ideological or institutional oppression. The marks of violence are written on their bodies, yet they seek to survive through mental determination or by turning the tables of violence on their predators, even as their gestures of new selfhood are caught in a slippage against ideology, gender and power.
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This discussion explores some of the ways in which historical narratives can emerge from gaps in ... more 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 Stopes's 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 Stopes's 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. As researchers, historians, biographers and writers, we work with the evidence we gather about our subjects through books, manuscripts, images, ephemera and objects of various kinds; often through repeated visits to a library, museum, archive or personal collection. Even as a by-product of research, these entities of knowledge can be irresistible: a worn fragment of soap kept in a wooden box, the flair and density of handwriting in ink, or a rare bound volume which always opens at a certain yellowed page. The impression of intimacy that the researcher gleans from these materials can create a sense of relationship with the subject; a glimpse of what Jorge Luis Borges described as the 'extravagant joy' of a belief in the possibility of a complete body of knowledge, a whole story, a whole life. 1 As I will suggest in this article, however, it may be within the gaps and absences of public and historical record, the incomplete manuscript, missing photograph, lost or censored personal correspondence, or amongst forgotten and unpopular themes and figures, that some of the most fruitful territory for historical writing and research can be found. As Carolyn Steedman observes, the archival historian must, in part, 'read for what is not there: the silence and the absences of the documents always speak to us'. 2 As this article
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Victorian Periodicals Review , 1997
This paper discusses Oscar Wilde's editorship of The Women's World and considers notions of gende... more This paper discusses Oscar Wilde's editorship of The Women's World and considers notions of gender and sexual identity, arguing that Wilde's role served to foreground and problematise the magazine as a site of feminine culture.
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Imagining the Impossible, 2020
In the past couple of decades, we’ve turned to fantasy movies, novels, TV shows and games in vast... more In the past couple of decades, we’ve turned to fantasy movies, novels, TV shows and games in vast numbers to distract ourselves from stress, uncertainty and fear. Our storytellers have asked ‘what if’ and we’ve immersed ourselves in their magical worlds, comforted by the belief that the terrifying visions are unreal. Is this the real pleasure of scary, exciting entertainment – our conviction that the whiz-bang pop-up frighteners of fantasy horror are nothing more than make believe? Does the virtual enchantment of transmedia storytelling make it all too easy to forget the real and terrible horror – war, disease and the destruction of forest homelands, the disasters that were already being played out year after year everywhere on Earth?
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Continuum , 2019
The ABC/Marvel Television fantasy series Jessica Jones, aired in 2015 and 2018, is the first tele... more The ABC/Marvel Television fantasy series Jessica Jones, aired in 2015 and 2018, is the first television series in the Marvel Cinematic Universe both to be made specifically for an adult audience and to feature a female superhero as a lead character.
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Text Journal of Writing and Writing Programs, 2019
Encounters with the historical and contemporary materiality of travel may occur objectively and/o... more Encounters with the historical and contemporary materiality of travel may occur objectively and/or imaginatively, as the traveller moves by air, land or water, passes streets, squares, buildings, enters rooms, museums, palaces, crosses bridges, mountains, canyons. Even other people can present as material entities, encapsulating the shock of difference, the flesh and odours of lived reality, the impossibility of possession. However prepared for a journey by reading, thinking, and research, in the end, for the writer as traveller, it is the act of travel while writing itself which becomes the heuristic enterprise, the experiment which leads to a solution, an understanding or a new question that may never be definitively solved. This discussion explores the representability of travel writing as material engagement and as a creative endeavour of scholarly inquiry. The presentation will take the form of a framed auto/narrative which follows a sequence of journeys undertaken by the author, in reverse order that speak to questions of authenticity and illusion across space and time.
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Continuum Journal, 2021
Supernatural narratives sustain popularity partly due to the way they speak to threats, such as t... more Supernatural narratives sustain popularity partly due to the way they speak to threats, such as the idea that the appearance of the monster heralds the inevitability of large–scale human destruction or transformation. The theme of apocalypse has become increasingly prevalent in popular culture, widely rehearsed in Anglo–American television horror since the 9/11 attack on New York City – with its concomitant sense of vulnerability amongst Western nations (Bennett 2019) and growing ethos of social and political extremity. In the third season of John Logan’s Penny Dreadful (Showtime/Sky, 2014–2016), Christian Camargo portrays the all–powerful vampire, Dracula, disguised as a charming museum curator, who entrances the female lead, Vanessa Ives, with his terrifying vision of an evolutionary “end of days” (S3:E6). Vanessa’s struggle to resist the compulsion of Dracula’s fatalistic embrace speaks to issues of pressing immediacy in our own time, including the ambiguities of human agency in the face of a transfigured world. This paper will interrogate the theme of compulsive apocalypse and the sublime in John Logan’s Penny Dreadful.
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Imagining The Impossible: International Journal for the Fantastic, 2023
The superhero fantasy Jessica Jones completed its third and nal season having o ered a sustained ... more The superhero fantasy Jessica Jones completed its third and nal season having o ered a sustained and unusual exploration of (dis)ability, social responsibility and the female superhero. In this essay, I discuss the character of Trish Walker, Jessica Jones's adoptive sister and friend, to consider how the series positions the two women in terms of gender, action and justice. Trish Walker's ambition is to be a superhero, like Jessica. She increases her agility and strength, rst through the drug IGH, then through a medical experiment, becoming a new version of the comic book vigilante Hellcat (Marvel /). After her mother is murdered in Season Three, however, Trish follows a troubling path of punishment and revenge without ethical restraint. Here, I consider how we can best interpret her story: as a critique of the scope of roles available to female characters, as a "dark play" (Linderoth and Mortensen) revenge experience, or, as an exploration of how far fantasy superheroes can go for justice and still remain heroic? In other words, what are, or should be, the limits of power for female action super heroes?
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Late eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century literary and artistic conceptions may seem f... more Late eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century literary and artistic conceptions may seem far removed from the complex, global materialism that characterises contemporary culture, yet many ideas associated with historical Romanticism continue to influence the study and practice of creative writing throughout the world. This is partly because of the power and diversity of the Romantic legacy – so many fine writers are associated with Romanticism – and partly because Romanticism continues to inform the contemporary zeitgeist in a variety of complex ways. J.M. Fitzgerald contends that one of Romanticism’s best known works, William Wordsworth’s The Prelude ushered in the idea ‘that each individual constructs themselves … and that each individual’s story is his or her own unique[ly]’ (2002: 101). This fundamental and far-reaching idea of the (more-or-less) separate self remains with us, however much it may have been reinflected by postmodernity.
This Special Issue of TEXT explores a variety of ways in which the Romantic legacy is both meaningful and problematic for contemporary writers, particularly those who are studying and working within universities in Australia. Romantic ideas and assumptions were brought to Australia when the British colonised the continent, dispossessing the Indigenous communities who occupied it and sustainably managed its environment. Since colonisation, the Romantic legacy has always been invested in Australia with problematic ideas about culture, the land, and human rights. Such issues are part of Australia’s literary heritage, too, and many historical and contemporary literary works are engaged with teasing out Romantic tropes and their Australian implications.
This Romantic legacy remains important whether writers are explicitly engaged with it or take it for granted. In either case, it inflects so many modes of thought and expression that it may be understood as a ghost in postmodernity’s machine, and also as the unresolved problematic at the heart of contemporary notions of Australian identity. As this issue of TEXT explores ideas connected to this legacy, it ranges widely, examining the making of self and being, how writers use lived experience and embodied emotion in the production of their work, how they interrogate constructions of nature and identity, and how they reflect practically and theoretically on the discipline of writing. All contributors engage with Romantic or post-Romantic cultural and literary ideas and, in a contemporary Australian context, this includes how notions of authorship are inflected with themes of loss and connection or disconnection from place.
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This paper investigates creative dislocation and the idea of the writer as exiled self through re... more This paper investigates creative dislocation and the idea of the writer as exiled self through reflections on the traction and slippages between ideas of place, dislocation and writing. For a writer, producing creative work through the experience of dislocation, whether voluntary or enforced, can be isolating and difficult, but it can also bring new perspectives and opportunities for creative capacity and expression. The creative resonances of writing in exile will be explored here with reference to David Malouf’s celebrated novella An Imaginary Life (1978) in which he depicts exile as a necessary journey of becoming, a ‘dynamic marginality’ as Braidotti observes (2002: 129), which offers creative possibility rather than closure and loss. For the writer Ovid, dislocation is phenomenological prerequisite for self-transformation. His discovery is that the writer must always be at the edge of things, noticing differently, available to possibility, able to embody and to channel being as metamorphoses through creative expression.
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http://refractory.unimelb.edu.au/2017/06/12/intro-pd/
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Papers by Stephanie Green
Techniques such as recursive adaptation, narrative hybridity and ensemble performance are now a t... more Techniques such as recursive adaptation, narrative hybridity and ensemble performance are now a tradition in fantasy screen drama, in both cinematic and serial mode, from the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (2003) to Agents of Shield (2013), in which several popular culture sources are woven together to create a new evocation of themes, stories and identities. Set in late-Victorian London, the richly awarded TV series Penny Dreadful (2014) alludes to a host of precursor texts from nineteenth century Gothic and sensation fiction. Among the many interesting elements of this finely crafted series is the ways in which it recasts minor or supporting female characters from these stories as powerful leading figures. This discussion will discuss the portrayal of Lily Frankenstein, a crucial minor character, to show how Penny Dreadful portrays transformative female identity through a Gothic redefinition of the late-Victorian New Woman.
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Text Journal, Special Issue: Creative Writing s Research, Volume 16 Number 15
This work investigates the problem of reconceptualising narrative in an era of digitised communic... more This work investigates the problem of reconceptualising narrative in an era of digitised communication (see, Egan 2010).
The Edge explores questions of narrative coherence, discontinuity and loss by recruiting web-based concepts and techniques for writing fiction. Borrowing a popular online textual mode, the ‘wiki’ page, the story is composed of interrelated fragments or vignettes. Its themes are enmeshed with its methodological frame: fragmentation, isolation, the randomness of loss and the pursuit of literary form.
The piece responds to Muecke’s call for writing that finds ‘a form that answers to its urgency’ (2010). In this sense, The Edge employs the wiki as a textual referent, an ‘objective correlative’ (Eliot 1921) against which the characters and their stories intersect and unfold, linking disparate textual elements. The wiki structure provides an innovative approach to the methodological and conceptual investigation of narrative writing within the context of contemporary communication. The story is not presented as an actual wiki page and does not contain active hyperlinks, but this is a feature being in future work.
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The television series Dexter uses the figure of appealing monstrosity to unfold troubled relation... more 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 Dexter's 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.
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This work considers some of the implications of using personal objects and their collectors as th... more This work considers some of the implications of using personal objects and their collectors as the foundation for creative writing and how these may inform or limit story formation. Inspired in part by Walter Benjamin’s exploration of loss and the material world (Illuminations, 2007), the themes are memory, recovery and the ethics of authenticity. Specifically, I address the writing of my own short story 'Antidote' in which I conduct an account of a manifold collection of objects
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This paper considers notions of seriousness and female authorship in late-Victorian Britain, in r... more This paper considers notions of seriousness and female authorship in late-Victorian Britain, in relation to the writer and scholar Charlotte Carmichael Stopes. The paper specifically addresses correspondence received by Stopes from Constance and Oscar Wilde during 1888 and 1889, regarding Stopes’ publication submissions to the Rational Dress Gazette and the Woman’s World. This correspondence offers an opportunity to consider some aspects of the dialogics of gender and authorship during this period. Using this example, the paper also explores the view articulated in different ways by Gabriel Schwab and Solveig Robinson, that late nineteenth-century the literary interventions of educated female writers, particularly writers of scholarly interpretation, were positioned outside the established social sphere, characterised as inconsequential or in terms of ‘threatening otherness’
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The genre of serial killer television drama offers an uncanny marriage between form and content. ... more The genre of serial killer television drama offers an uncanny marriage between form and content. This is intensified in the case of Dexter where the story’s continuance relies both on episodic restitution and viewer complicity. This paper explores how the series uses the trope of monstrosity to unfold relationships between subjectivity, narrative and community. Exploring Jeffrey Jerome Cohen’s premise that monstrosity unsettles and challenges a totalised epistemology, Dexter will considered as an expression of multivalent social fears and as a satire on the prevalence of serial murder as domestic screen entertainment. Its self-conscious treatment of a trope with strong literary and televisual foundations arguably foregrounds a discursive tension between viewer manipulation and introjected desire.
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"This work is impelled by a proposition that the Gothic trope of the imprisoned madwoman holds re... more "This work is impelled by a proposition that the Gothic trope of the imprisoned madwoman holds resonance and power as a narrative device for exploring Australia’s difficult past. Adapted from ‘Bluebeard’s Wife’, this trope has long held potency for
women writers (Williams 1995; Gilbert and Gubar 1979), epitomised by the incarcerated Caribbean wife, of Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea. The setting, a Gothic Revival Lunatic Asylum, is both emblem of power and site of surveillance (Foucault 2001: 37), invoking fears of hybridisation and dissolution."
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Special Issue: by Stephanie Green
This Special Issue of TEXT explores a variety of ways in which the Romantic legacy is both meaningful and problematic for contemporary writers, particularly those who are studying and working within universities in Australia. Romantic ideas and assumptions were brought to Australia when the British colonised the continent, dispossessing the Indigenous communities who occupied it and sustainably managed its environment. Since colonisation, the Romantic legacy has always been invested in Australia with problematic ideas about culture, the land, and human rights. Such issues are part of Australia’s literary heritage, too, and many historical and contemporary literary works are engaged with teasing out Romantic tropes and their Australian implications.
This Romantic legacy remains important whether writers are explicitly engaged with it or take it for granted. In either case, it inflects so many modes of thought and expression that it may be understood as a ghost in postmodernity’s machine, and also as the unresolved problematic at the heart of contemporary notions of Australian identity. As this issue of TEXT explores ideas connected to this legacy, it ranges widely, examining the making of self and being, how writers use lived experience and embodied emotion in the production of their work, how they interrogate constructions of nature and identity, and how they reflect practically and theoretically on the discipline of writing. All contributors engage with Romantic or post-Romantic cultural and literary ideas and, in a contemporary Australian context, this includes how notions of authorship are inflected with themes of loss and connection or disconnection from place.
Papers by Stephanie Green
The Edge explores questions of narrative coherence, discontinuity and loss by recruiting web-based concepts and techniques for writing fiction. Borrowing a popular online textual mode, the ‘wiki’ page, the story is composed of interrelated fragments or vignettes. Its themes are enmeshed with its methodological frame: fragmentation, isolation, the randomness of loss and the pursuit of literary form.
The piece responds to Muecke’s call for writing that finds ‘a form that answers to its urgency’ (2010). In this sense, The Edge employs the wiki as a textual referent, an ‘objective correlative’ (Eliot 1921) against which the characters and their stories intersect and unfold, linking disparate textual elements. The wiki structure provides an innovative approach to the methodological and conceptual investigation of narrative writing within the context of contemporary communication. The story is not presented as an actual wiki page and does not contain active hyperlinks, but this is a feature being in future work.
women writers (Williams 1995; Gilbert and Gubar 1979), epitomised by the incarcerated Caribbean wife, of Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea. The setting, a Gothic Revival Lunatic Asylum, is both emblem of power and site of surveillance (Foucault 2001: 37), invoking fears of hybridisation and dissolution."
This Special Issue of TEXT explores a variety of ways in which the Romantic legacy is both meaningful and problematic for contemporary writers, particularly those who are studying and working within universities in Australia. Romantic ideas and assumptions were brought to Australia when the British colonised the continent, dispossessing the Indigenous communities who occupied it and sustainably managed its environment. Since colonisation, the Romantic legacy has always been invested in Australia with problematic ideas about culture, the land, and human rights. Such issues are part of Australia’s literary heritage, too, and many historical and contemporary literary works are engaged with teasing out Romantic tropes and their Australian implications.
This Romantic legacy remains important whether writers are explicitly engaged with it or take it for granted. In either case, it inflects so many modes of thought and expression that it may be understood as a ghost in postmodernity’s machine, and also as the unresolved problematic at the heart of contemporary notions of Australian identity. As this issue of TEXT explores ideas connected to this legacy, it ranges widely, examining the making of self and being, how writers use lived experience and embodied emotion in the production of their work, how they interrogate constructions of nature and identity, and how they reflect practically and theoretically on the discipline of writing. All contributors engage with Romantic or post-Romantic cultural and literary ideas and, in a contemporary Australian context, this includes how notions of authorship are inflected with themes of loss and connection or disconnection from place.
The Edge explores questions of narrative coherence, discontinuity and loss by recruiting web-based concepts and techniques for writing fiction. Borrowing a popular online textual mode, the ‘wiki’ page, the story is composed of interrelated fragments or vignettes. Its themes are enmeshed with its methodological frame: fragmentation, isolation, the randomness of loss and the pursuit of literary form.
The piece responds to Muecke’s call for writing that finds ‘a form that answers to its urgency’ (2010). In this sense, The Edge employs the wiki as a textual referent, an ‘objective correlative’ (Eliot 1921) against which the characters and their stories intersect and unfold, linking disparate textual elements. The wiki structure provides an innovative approach to the methodological and conceptual investigation of narrative writing within the context of contemporary communication. The story is not presented as an actual wiki page and does not contain active hyperlinks, but this is a feature being in future work.
women writers (Williams 1995; Gilbert and Gubar 1979), epitomised by the incarcerated Caribbean wife, of Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea. The setting, a Gothic Revival Lunatic Asylum, is both emblem of power and site of surveillance (Foucault 2001: 37), invoking fears of hybridisation and dissolution."
A review appeared in the Times Literary Supplement, Oct, 2013.