Unleashed academics, tutors, and ornamental hermits Alice and Rowan do a deep dive into dark hero archetypes on a semi-weekly basis.
This episode they cover Charlotte Dacre's Zofloya: Or the Moor (1806) and discuss why it has been so difficult to define the novel's unique protagonist. Is she a femme fatale, a gothic heroine, or an attempt to subvert the gothic genre?
Sources:
Brewster, Glen. "Monstrous Philosophy: Charlotte Dacre’s Zofloya, or the Moor and John Milton’s Paradise Lost." Literature Compass 8, no. 9 (2011): 609-19.
Clery, E. J. Women’s Gothic: From Clara Reeve to Mary Shelley. Devon, England: Northcote House, 2000.
Craciun, Adriana. ""I Hasten to Be Disembodied": Charlotte Dacre, the Demon Lover, and Representations of the Body." European Romantic Review 6, no. 1 (1996): 75-97.
Craciun, Adriana, James Chandler, and Marilyn Butler, eds. Fatal Women of Romanticism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
Dacre, Charlotte. Zofloya: Or the Moor. Edited by Kim Michasiw. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997.
———. Zofloya: Or the Moor. Edited by Adriana Craciun. Ontario: Broadview Press, 2006.
Davison, Carol. "Getting Their Knickers in a Twist: Contesting the ‘Female Gothic’ in Charlotte Dacre's Zofloya." Gothic Studies 11, no. 1 (2009): 32-45.
Dunn, Jame. "Charlotte Dacre and the Feminization of Violence." Nineteenth-Century Literature 53, no. 3 (1998): 307-27.
Faxneld, Per. "Woman Liberated by the Devil in Four Gothic Novels: William Beckford’s
Vathek (1786), Matthew Lewis’ the Monk (1796), Charlotte Dacre’s Zofloya or the Moor (1806) and Charles Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer (1820)." In Grotesque Femininities: Evil, Women and the Feminine, edited by Maria Barrett. Oxford:
Interdisciplinary Press, 2010.
Gentile, Kathy. "Sublime Drag: Supernatural Masculinity in Gothic Fiction." Gothic Studies 11, no. 1 (2009): 16-31.
Gilbert, Sandra, and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. 2nd ed. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000.
Jones, Anne H. "Charlotte Dacre." In Ideas and Innovations: Best Sellers of Jane
Austen's Age. New York: AMS Press, 1986.
Mellor, Anne K. Romanticism and Gender. New York: Routledge, 1993.
