Word: gothic
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Located in the Smithsonian Institution's Victorian-Gothic headquarters building and affiliated with the Woodrow Wilson Center for Scholars, the new Kennan Institute will bring experts from round the world to Washington for all-expense-paid weekend seminars, short-term research projects and yearlong fellowships. Its goal: to deepen U.S. understanding of the Soviet Union. Says Kennan: "This is the only truly national institution devoted to Soviet studies. It can serve as an anchor in bad times and a channel for improved communications in good times...
...produces fresh, provocative insights into the workings of particular female imaginations. She suggests that Frankenstein, written by Mary Shelley at 18, is a grotesque birth myth subliminally inspired by the traumas its author must have suffered as an unwed teen-age mother. Moers also persuasively argues that the gothic novel has its origins in Radcliffe's desire to find a respectably feminine substitute for the male picaresque tradition. The mysterious creaking castles kept her 18th century maidens properly indoors, while providing them with all the alarms and excursions that Smollett's rogues enjoyed. Moer's discussion...
Though Joan Samson's first novel owes its resonance to Shirley Jackson's American-gothic short story The Lottery, the book tends to provoke rather than frighten. The author's poetic imagery highlights the New England scene and characters: "Beneath the high wind, a tongue of water rang against the scoured stones like the wooden clapper in a bell, warning that they were slippery." The Auctioneer becomes less a tale of suspense than a parable of politics. The open questions it poses are as old as society itself: What is the nature of power? What makes people...
...Book of Common Prayer is a majestic mainstay of the Anglican faith. It is, as G.K. Chesterton observed, "the masterpiece of Protestantism, the one magnet and talisman for people even outside the Anglican Church, as are the great Gothic cathedrals for people outside the Catholic Church." The Prayer Book has remained essentially unchanged for 300 years. Should it now be modernized...
...Manhattan cineasts and the disconcerting tale of a projectionist trapped in a laughably bad movie. Getting Into Death, the collection's longest and best story, follows a writer through the last weeks of her fatal illness. On paper she is two writers: Cassandra Knye, a successful purveyor of gothic romances, and B.C. Millar, author of esoteric murder mysteries. Chain-smoking cigarettes and wisecracking with a stream of hospital visitors, she searches stoically among her own past fictions for the kind of lie that will prepare her for her final scene with death...