Word: gothic
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Grace, Bernard Malamud conceived of a latter-day Noah, adrift on an ark. Doris Lessing has taken an apparently irreversible leap into outer space with her multivolume chronicle of "galactic empires." Now Joyce Carol Oates has again wandered off into the never-never land of the neo-gothic romance. In Oates' case, the purpose of the excursion is parody. A Bloodsmoor Romance, like the author's 1980 Bellefleur, is intended to poke fun at gushy Victorian women novelists and such latter-day descendants as Barbara Cartland, Victoria Holt and Rosemary Rogers...
...only after several hundred pages do we discover alternate versions of several of the family's accepted pasts. Neither time nor sight can be trusted with both ghosts and the mad genius John Quincy Zinn seeking of defy them. Modern science and spiritualism mingle in an atmosphere at once gothic and surreal...
...Susquehanna, Pa., four days before he was to have married for the third time. A philosophical fabulist, Gardner wrote a dozen novels (among them, Grendel, 1971; The Sunlight Dialogues, 1972; October Light, 1976) in which he examined age-old questions like freedom vs. license through the prism of a gothic imagination that he said was set working by "the world of Walt Disney. I see those Disney images everywhere-in Dante, in Homer, above all in Chaucer." In On Moral Fiction (1978) he argued fiercely for positive, inspiring writing and charged that, by contrast, "almost all modern art is tinny...
...when he took up the study of Saxon legal codes and 42 when he first turned to writing the history of the Jefferson and Madison Administrations, and 49 when he laboriously began on Chinese. In his 50s, a tiny, why figure with a graying beard, the future master of Gothic architecture solemnly learned to ride a bicycle. -By Otto Friedrich. Reported...
...maximum-security prisons. With the exception of Leavenworth, all are state institutions. Most of these places are famous in American folklore and in grim modern history. Their names evoke images of riots in the yards, of searchlights and sirens, of tin cups banged in unison on the tables of gothic mess halls. The normal reality of prison life is, of course, calmer, but no less extraordinary. These are societies made up largely of people who have robbed, attacked and murdered other people, after all, and of those who oversee them. No world they compose could be anything but bizarre...