Word: gothic
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Gillian Freeman, who is quite literate, is a writer in the Austen tradition. With its gothic surprise ending and all, the plot of An Easter Egg Hunt could be summarized in a couple of lines. Yet Freeman does more than merely tell a story. She re-creates an era. The story is set in the famed English countryside, during World War I. The Great War intrudes on the narrative no more than it intrudes on the small girls' school in which the action transpires. Tightened food supplies and army cadets training nearby are the only evidence in the girls' little...
...anxious not to lose her money. Defense lawyers dismiss this as a possible motive, though they concede that the marriage had foundered and that Von Bülow had had an affair, reportedly with New York City Socialite Alexandra Isles, a sometime actress who appeared in the television gothic soap opera Dark Shadows. They contend that Sunny was a pathologically shy woman, who assuaged her demons with alcohol, drugs and compulsive eating, and either deliberately or accidentally caused the coma through her own excesses. Von Bülow, they say, had no need of her money, since he was capable...
Crimes of the Heart. Three sisters, nurtured in Southern gothic grotesquerie, induce spasms of laughter in Beth Henley's Pulitzer-prizewinning drama. Dreamgirls. A pearl in the strand of notable U.S. musicals. There is dazzling elegance in Theoni V. Aldredge's costumes, and a young belter named Jennifer Holliday can start, stop and steal a show. (See above.) The Dresser. Paul Rogers plays a decrepit provincial Shakespearean actor-manager; Tom Courtenay, his valet. In double image, they are Lear and his Fool-and both are magnificent...
...magician uses sleights of hand to create his fiction; the writer uses sleights of mind. Edgar Allan Poe, whose stories and poems have put generations of readers into a gothic trance, took time out to satirize the tricks of the literary trade. His Eureka uses metaphysical doubletalk to "explain" philosophy. The patter creates credibility, leading Poe to conclude elsewhere that "pleased at comprehending, we often are so excited as to take it for granted that we assent." In "Diddling: Considered as One of the Exact Sciences," he offers the ingredients of a good con: "Minuteness, interest, perseverance, ingenuity, audacity, nonchalance...
...final decision to fix the date was a direct response to an array of pagan harvest festivals, and ignored the philosophical arguments offered by some Christian theologians. Most sun-worshiping early religions--including the Persian, Roman Norse, Gothic, Celtic and Anglo-Saxon--staged lavish winter solstice celebrations to mark the annual rebirth...