This is the most comprehensive analytical study ever done of The Phantom of the Opera in its many different versions from the original Gaston Leroux novel to the present day. It proposes answers to the question, 'why do we keep needing this story told and retold in the Western world?' by revealing the history of deep cultural tensions that underlie the novel and each major adaptation. Using extensive historical and textual evidence and drawing on perspectives from several theories of cultural study, this book argues that we need this tale told and reconfigured because it provides us ways to both confront and disguise how we have fashioned our senses of identity in the Western middle class. The Phantom of the Opera - in varying ways over time - turns out like the 'Gothic' tradition it extends, to be deeply connected to Western self-fashioning in the face of conflicted attitudes about class, gender, race, religious beliefs, Freudian psychology, economic and international tensions, and especially the shifting and permeable boundaries between 'high' and 'low' culture. This book should interest all students of the history of Western culture, as well as those especially fascinated by Gothic fiction, opera, musical theatre, and film.
Celebrated as an actress on the London stage (1776–80) and notorious as the mistress of the Prince of Wales (1779–80), Mary Darby Robinson had to write to support herself from the mid–1780s until her death in 1800. She mastered a wide range of styles, published prolifically, and became the poetry editor of the Morning Post. As her writing developed across the 1790s, she increasingly used the motifs of Gothic fiction and drama descended from Horace Walpole's Castle of Otranto (1764). These came to pervade her late novels and poems so much that she even wrote her autobiography as a Gothic romance. She also deployed them to critique the ideologies of male dominance and the forms of writing in which they appeared. This progression culminated in her final collection of verses, Lyrical Tales (1800), where she Gothically exposes the conflicted underpinnings in the now-famous Lyrical Ballads (1798) by Wordsworth and Coleridge.
In this set of thorough and revisionary readings of Percy Bysshe Shelley's best-known writings in verse and prose, Hogle argues that the logic and style in all these works are governed by a movement in every thought, memory, image, or word-pattern whereby each is seen and sees itself in terms of a radically different form. For any specified entity or figure to be known for "what it is," it must be reconfigured by and in terms of another one at another level (which must then be dislocated itself). In so delineating Shelley's "process," Hogle reveals the revisionary procedure in the poet's various texts and demonstrates the powerful effects of "radical transference" in Shelley's visions of human possibility.
Celebrated as an actress on the London stage (1776–80) and notorious as the mistress of the Prince of Wales (1779–80), Mary Darby Robinson had to write to support herself from the mid–1780s until her death in 1800. She mastered a wide range of styles, published prolifically, and became the poetry editor of the Morning Post. As her writing developed across the 1790s, she increasingly used the motifs of Gothic fiction and drama descended from Horace Walpole's Castle of Otranto (1764). These came to pervade her late novels and poems so much that she even wrote her autobiography as a Gothic romance. She also deployed them to critique the ideologies of male dominance and the forms of writing in which they appeared. This progression culminated in her final collection of verses, Lyrical Tales (1800), where she Gothically exposes the conflicted underpinnings in the now-famous Lyrical Ballads (1798) by Wordsworth and Coleridge.
In this set of thorough and revisionary readings of Percy Bysshe Shelley's best-known writings in verse and prose, Hogle argues that the logic and style in all these works are governed by a movement in every thought, memory, image, or word-pattern whereby each is seen and sees itself in terms of a radically different form. For any specified entity or figure to be known for "what it is," it must be reconfigured by and in terms of another one at another level (which must then be dislocated itself). In so delineating Shelley's "process," Hogle reveals the revisionary procedure in the poet's various texts and demonstrates the powerful effects of "radical transference" in Shelley's visions of human possibility.
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