Bloody Records: Manuscripts and Politics in The Castle of Otranto
Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764) famously begins when a giant medieval helmet plummets from the sky and fatally crushes Conrad, the only son and heir of Manfred the Prince of Otranto, on his wedding day. This event is a harbinger of things to come as more supernatural objects from the past descend in various ways on the castle to reveal the true history of Manfred’s ill-gotten rule over Otranto. As Manfred plots to divorce his wife and marry Conrad’s fiancée, Isabella, he stalks Isabella through a castle increasingly characterized by its medieval malevolence: a giant, armored hand appears on a banister; an army arrives bearing a colossal, ancient sword; a figure walks out of an old, musty portrait; a skeletal monk speaks. The novel reaches its climax when, in a case of mistaken identity, Manfred accidentally stabs his own daughter in a fit of rage. In the tumultuous denouement, the spirit of Alfonso the Good, the original Prince of Otranto and ghostly owner of the giant spectral objects that have mysteriously appeared throughout the story, materializes. He breaks the castle into ruins, reveals a seedy history of murder and forgery, and names a local peasant, Theodore, the rightful heir to Otranto before ascending into the sky in a giant fireball alongside St. Nicholas. Otranto’s wild supernatural machinations would become stock features of the Gothic novel, as would its medieval setting. In fact, critics have frequently treated the novel’s historicity as its most important formal feature. By setting Otranto in the murky medieval past, Walpole would seem to remove characters and readers alike from the empiricist ideologies of the Enlightenment and the demands of realist fiction, facilitating the Gothic’s unbelievable plot devices and sentimental effects. Understanding the
The Comic Tragedy of Mere Men and Women: The Ambiguously Distracting Use of Laughter in The Castle of Otranto and Its Prefaces
This paper attempts to analyze the curious effects of the comic scenes in The Castle of Otranto (1764) through a close reading of Walpole’s famous prefaces to the novel. The comic scenes evoke an incongruous dramatic response and contradict the claims made in the prefaces, according to which comic elements highlight dramatic ones. While being often thought of as indicative of a general aesthetic failure, the comic elements in this foundational text of the Gothic are indeed subtle, complex and artful. More precisely, Walpole’s curious use of laughter makes a complex appeal to an extra-dramatic level which undercuts the reader’s identification with the dramatic situations represented in the novel. Keywords: Horace Walpole; The Castle of Otranto; comedy; drama; Gothic novel; prefaces
FlowBrush: optical flow art
The depiction of motion in static representations has a long tradition in art and science alike. Often, motion is depicted by spatio-temporal summarizations that try to preserve as much information of the original dynamic content as possible. In our approach to depicting motion, we remove the spatial constraints and generate new content steered by the temporal changes in motion. Applying particle steering in combination with the dynamic color palette of the video content, we can create a wide range of different image styles. With recorded videos, or by live interaction with a webcam, one can influence the resulting image. We provide a set of intuitive parameters to affect the style of the result, the final image content depends on the video input. Based on a collection of results gathered from test users, we discuss example styles that can be achieved with FlowBrush. In general, our approach provides an open sandbox for creative people to generate aesthetic images from any video content they apply.