Search results

This chapter is an examination of the contribution of female musicianship to the Perth metal scene, particularly in relation to the positioning of women in frontier mythology and the ways in which we might read the gothic sublime in terms of women’s experiences. While it has been recognised that Australian metal music, in general, is tied to the colonial frontier narrative, Perth’s isolation produces a particular kind of frontier narrative which can be read in relation to the gothic sublime. In this chapter, the author examines three Perth metal bands which comprise female members: Claim the Throne (featuring Jess Millea on keys and vocals), Sanzu (featuring Fatima Curley on bass) and Deadspace (featuring Shelby Jansen on bass and vocals). The author will argue that there is a motif running through Perth bands that comprise female musicians that is tied to their positioning in the Western frontier narrative and its production in relation to the gothic sublime. To do so presents one kind of way to conceptualise a metal scene on the ‘Western Front’. The author emphasises that this is not a totalising conceptualisation, rather, it is one way to suggest how context might shape women’s experiences and, perhaps more importantly for this argument, the way in which women women’s experiences and historicity in relation to the legacy of ‘frontierswomen’ inflect metal music in this scene.

This chapter serves as the introduction to the edited collection, calling into focus the diverse ways in which ‘Australia’ is asserted in the spaces, scenes and practices of Australian heavy metal. This chapter responds to earlier quandaries in the sparse research on Australian metal which question if there is anything definitively ‘Australian’ about the characteristics, themes and narratives demonstrated within Australian heavy metal scenes. In response to this challenge, the author uses this chapter to establish critical foundations for addressing how Australianness has been represented ‘Downunderground’ (Phillipov, 2008, p. 215) – historically, musically and geographically, as work in this collection affirms. This introduction foregrounds the concerns of the edited collection at large, which addresses how national identity has been imagined and constructed in ways which can at once celebrate problematic patriarchal nationalist symbolism, yet also call into focus the resistant and subversive ways in which metal scenes have deconstructed, critiqued and renegotiated the parameters of what it means to be ‘Australian’. This chapter asserts that any interrogation of the ‘Australianness’ of Australian metal must problematise the notion of a singularly ‘Australian’ identity in the first instance. Here the author argues that ‘Australian metal’ as a consolidated signifier must be problematised to instead come to an understanding of the multisited ways in which ‘Australianness’ is experienced within scenes. In doing so the author establishes the critical trajectories for the edited collection at large – to track the genealogies of Australian metal as a component in a wider global scene, and consider the plurality of its contemporary manifestations.

Purpose – To propose a radically new way to understand the science of Cesare Lombroso, the first scientific criminologist, and thus to broaden understanding of the origins of criminology.

Approach – Using both comparative and analytical methods, we locate Lombroso's science of criminal anthropology in the context of late nineteenth-century Gothicism.

Findings – Lombroso's born criminals were Gothic creations, holdovers (like the crumbling castles of Gothic novels) from an earlier, less civilized period, human gargoyles (like the characters of Gothic romances) redolent of death and the uncanny. Moreover, Lombroso's Gothic science, with its depictions of physically and psychologically abnormal criminals, contributed to a transformation in social control by scientifically legitimating the social exclusion and intensified control of those perceived as morally monstrous.

Originality and value – This study creates a new framework for understanding Lombroso's contributions to criminological science and social control. Moreover, in a way that is almost unique in criminology, it combines historical research in literature and art with the history of science.

Research implications – To a degree not usually recognized, a science and its social control ramifications can be shaped by the artistic sensibilities and cultural traditions of the period in which it develops.

Dark Souls heralded a shift from the dichotomy of survival horror, and instead, thrust the player into a world where narrative was everywhere (if only you dared to look). This chapter explores the reimagination of Gothic narrative and narrative engagement in the cryptic and fragmented nested narratives of the iconic FromSoftware, Inc. series. In doing so, this chapter highlights the emergence of a hybrid ludo-narrative form within the Gothic genre, and examines the ways in which the series presents said narratives to the player as it shifts the onus of narrative engagement from the storyteller to the one now living the experience. The chapter explores video-ludic interpretations of death, play, and experientiality through the lens of video game studies, and posits the value of the series as a defining moment in the Japanese action role-playing game genre.

This contribution is an investigation into the palpable connection of extreme metal music and concepts of death, dying and mortality. Like other dark subcultures, metal has an intense infatuation with the macabre; many of its subcultures seek to uncover meaning through musical exploration into varying dark themes that emerge when thinking about death and what lies beyond the bounds of existence. From the abrasive and animalistic blood lust of death metal to the melancholic textures of black metal and the sonic void evoked in doom metal, extreme metal is a catalyst through which fans of the macabre can explore many perceptions and conceptions of corporeal fragility; the consuming pain of life, of death, and of knowing; and the existential notion of the ungraspable abyss. This chapter explores these varying conceptualisations of death in extreme metal culture, their sonic representations and their cathartic consolation: delving into the psychoanalytic reasoning and embodied sound of death.

Giambattista Piranesi's disturbing images of fantasy prisons set out in his Carceri d'Invenzione have had a profound impact on cultural sensibilities. The chapter explores Piranesi's distinctive visual language and situates it in an eighteenth-century penchant for ruins and what they might signify. The macabre fantasy structures bear little relation to actually existing prison buildings, but they do herald a new aesthetic combining both terror and beauty to sublime effect. The chapter examines the relationships between narrative and visual methods by considering that scholarship in art history which has sought to address the relationships between ‘word’ and ‘image’.

Much of it belongs to what was once the ‘new art history’ in the 1970s, and which had become critical of how conventional approaches in the discipline had tended to see art as the visualisation of narrative. For example, Norman Bryson's (1981) study of French painting in the Ancien Régime explored the relationships between ‘word’ and ‘image’ by examining the kind of stories pictures tell, drawing a distinction between the ‘discursive’ aspects of an image (posing questions on visual art's language-like qualities and relationships to written text) and those ‘figural’ features that place the image as primarily a visual experience – it's ‘being-as-image’ – that is entirely independent of language.

The focus on language is symptomatic of the ‘linguistic turn’ that has had such a profound influence on intellectual thought since the 1960s, and this chapter will concentrate on one strand in it. In particular, it will introduce the approach Jacques Derrida developed and defined as ‘deconstruction’, which in some important respects revealed the limitations of language, and seeks to create the effects of ‘decentring’ by highlighting how signification is a complex, often duplicitous, process. The chapter then situates Piranesi's images in an account of landscape, not least since he was a leading exponent of the veduta (a faithful representation of an actual urban or rural view) that had achieved the status of a distinctive and popular genre by the eighteenth century.