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| | Romanticism On the Net 10 (May 1998) (Site not responding. Last check: ) |
 | | In the impressive array of literary material gathered in support of the argument about the period's 'ruination of traditional constructs of human identity'(3), Hurley opens a rich and suggestive vein of Gothic horror, sinking her teeth into numerous examples of decomposing flesh, slimy bodies, anamorphotically bestial and sexually polymorphous creatures. |
 | | But with the abhuman generalised into a definitive, if formless, condition for those that once considered themselves 'human', a strange, and Gothic, truth is revealed: structures, like sex and identity, are arbitrary and provisional, the idea of full humanity no more than an illusion.(pp. |
 | | Instead of instituting a single opposition, like that of human versus abhuman, the argument proceeds on the basis of cultural and historically specific readings of particular configurations of sexual, class, religious and racial oppositions in texts that include Gothic devices. |
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