Abstract This essay reads Erskine Childers's genre-defining spy novel The Riddle of the Sands (1903) for its attempts to exhort readers into nationalistic and militaristic enthusiasm. The novel, which follows two amateur spies who stumble upon German plans to invade England's vulnerable coast, was written to alarm the British government and citizenry of the “the national security [that] was really being neglected.” This essay argues that, within the context of Edwardian invasion paranoia, Childers uses literary form and tropes to enlist readers into jingoistic attitudes, masculine performance, and military action. As he writes a genre into existence, Childers's highly self-aware literary form models ways of being that rehearse and communicate ideology. Following the protagonist through his journey from amateur yachtsman to volunteer covert operative, readers are encouraged to identify vicariously not only with visions of masculine nationalism but with Childers's practices of generic citation. With one foot in the moralizing Victorian novel and another in the twentieth-century thriller, Childers models the cultivation and consolidation of nationalist ideologies through the protagonist's own self-fashioning as an archetype of adventure fiction. By emphasizing citation practices, Childers thus instructs readers as to how his own didactic novel ought to be read and understood. Guided by an education in reconnaissance and masculine performance, Childers models his protagonist's ideological formation and writes into his novel ways of reading as ways of being for the would-be English nationalist, enlistee, and spy.
Abstract This essay seeks to understand and interrogate existing readings of Ari Aster's 2018 film Hereditary as a work that posits the horrifying and supernatural as allegories for grief and familial trauma. Taking readings of Hereditary as exemplary of existing critical approaches to horror and its strategies of communicating meaning, this study argues that allegorical readings of horror fiction neglect increasingly common communication strategies and objectives taken up by horror creators and audiences. An examination of Hereditary shows that an appraisal of the film's formal and narrative experiments is necessary to parse its content, and that when such an appraisal is undertaken, many of these narrative elements contradict thematic readings of the film altogether. Concretely, Aster's film relies on an overabundance and disjunction of information to horrify, rather than on classic strategies of suspense predicated on hiding and revealing information sequentially. Instead of inducing audiences to ask, “What is about to happen?” Hereditary lays bare a machinery of violent accumulation and forces its viewers to ask, “How does it work?” Fundamentally, this is the question this essay takes up, not with the intention to privilege one interpretation over another but as a demonstration of what can be accomplished by engaging with horror beyond the paradigm of allegory.
