Gothic Literary Studies
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George Eliot and the Gothic Novel
Genres, Gender and Feeling
by Royce Mahawatte
Part of the Gothic Literary Studies series
George Eliot and the Gothic Novel is the first monograph to systematically explore George Eliot's relationship to Gothic genres. It considers the ways in which the author's ethics link to sensational story-telling tropes. Reappraising the major works of fiction, this study compares passages of Eliot's writing with sequences from eighteenth and nineteenth-century Gothic works. Royce Mahawatte examines Eliot's deployment of, for example, the incarcerated heroine in Middlemarch, doppelgangers in Romola and vampiric queerness in Daniel Deronda. In doing so he lifts Eliot from the boundaries of social realism and places her within a broader and richer Victorian literary scene than has been previously considered.
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Posthuman Gothic
by Various Authors
Part of the Gothic Literary Studies series
Posthuman Gothic is an edited collection of thirteen chapters, and offers a structured, dialogical contribution to the discussion of the posthuman Gothic. Contributors explore the various ways in which posthuman thought intersects with Gothic textuality and mediality. The texts and media under discussion—from I am Legend to In the Flesh, and from Star Trek to The Truman Show, transgress the boundaries of genre, moving beyond the traditional scope of the Gothic. These texts, the contributors argue, destabilise ideas of the human in a number of ways. By confronting humanity and its Others, they introduce new perspectives on what we traditionally perceive as human. Drawing on key texts of both Gothic and posthumanist theory, the contributors explore such varied themes as posthuman vampire and zombie narratives, genetically modified posthumans, the posthuman in video games, film and TV, the posthuman as a return to nature, the posthuman's relation to classic monster narratives, and posthuman biohorror and theories of prometheanism and accelerationism. In its entirety, the volume offers a first attempt at addressing the various intersections of the posthuman and the Gothic in contemporary literature and media.
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South Asian Gothic
Haunted Cultures, Histories and Media
by Various Authors
Part of the Gothic Literary Studies series
This book is the first attempt to theorise South Asian Gothic production as a common cultural landscape, taking into account both the historical perspective and the variety of media texts. The volume consists of fifteen chapters by experts in film, literature and cultural studies of South Asia, representing the diversity of the region and a number of ways in which Gothic manifests in contemporary South Asian cultures. Gothic in South Asia can be read as a distinctive aesthetic, narrative practice, or a process of signification, where conventional Gothic tropes and imagery are assessed anew and global forms are consumed, appropriated, translated, transformed or resisted. The volume investigates South Asian Gothic as a local variety of international Gothic and part of the transnational category of globalgothic, contributing to the ongoing discussion on the need to de-westernise Gothic methodologies and ensure that Gothic scholarship remains relevant in the culturally-diverse modern world.
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The Queer Uncanny
New Perspectives on the Gothic
by Paulina Palmer
Part of the Gothic Literary Studies series
The Queer Uncanny: New Perspectives on the Gothic investigates the diverse roles that the uncanny, as defined by Sigmund Freud, Helene Cixous and other theorists, plays in representing lesbian and male gay sexualities and transgender in a selection of contemporary British, American and Caribbean fiction published 1980-2007. Novels by Christopher Bram, Alan Hollinghurst, Randall Kenan, Shani Mootoo, James Purdy, Sarah Schulman, Ali Smith, Sarah Waters, Jeanette Winterson and other writers are discussed in the context of queer theory and gothic critical writing. The notion of the uncanny as 'tangential and to one side' and 'appearing on the fringe of something else', as defined by Cixous and Rosemary Jackson, appropriately evokes the situation of the queer individual living in a minority sub-culture and existing in oblique relation to hetero-normative society. Motifs with uncanny connotations discussed include secrets that society would prefer to remain hidden but come to light, spectral visitation, the emergence of repressed fears and desires, the double, and the homely/ unhomely house. Writers employ them to explore topics integral to queer existence. These include secrets relating to the closet and AIDS; homosexual panic; lesbian social invisibility; transgender subjectivity; the intersection between sexuality and race; the vilification of the queer subject as 'monstrous Other'; the domestic life of the gay couple destabilised by homophobic influences from the public world; and the heterosexual family disrupted by homosexual secrets from within. The queer recasting of gothic motifs, such as the haunted house, the uncanny city, the grotesque body, and the breakdown of the family due to paternal incest, receives attention.
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Industrial Gothic
Workers, Exploitation and Urbanization in Transatlantic Nineteenth-Century Literature
by Bridget M. Marshall
Part of the Gothic Literary Studies series
This volume carves out a new area of study, the 'industrial Gothic', placing the genre in dialogue with the literature of the Industrial Revolution. The book explores a significant subset of transatlantic nineteenth-century literature that employs the tropes, themes and rhetoric of the Gothic to portray the real-life horrors of factory life, framing the Industrial Revolution as a site of Gothic excess and horror. Using archival materials from the nineteenth century, localised incidences of Gothic industrialisation (in specific cities like Lowell and Manchester) are considered alongside transnational connections and comparisons. The author argues that stories about the real horrors of factory life frequently employed the mode of the Gothic, while nineteenth century writing in the genre (stories, novels, poems and stage adaptations) began to use new settings—factories, mills, and industrial cities—as backdrops for the horrors that once populated Gothic castles.
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Women's Ghost Literature in Nineteenth-Century Britain
by Melissa Makala
Part of the Gothic Literary Studies series
Nineteenth-century ghost literature by women shows the Gothic becoming more experimental and subversive as its writers abandoned the stereotypical Gothic heroines of the past in order to create more realistic, middle-class characters (both living and dead, male and female) who rage against the limits imposed on them by the natural world. The ghosts of Female Gothic thereby become reflections of the social, sexual, economic and racial troubles of the living. Expanding the parameters of Female Gothic and moving it into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries allows us to recognise women's ghost literature as a specific strain of the Female Gothic that began not with Ann Radcliffe, but with the Romantic Gothic ballads of women in the first decade of the nineteenth century.
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Spectral Spain
Haunted Houses, Silent Spaces And Traumatic Memories In Post-franco Gothic Fiction
by Heidi Backes
Part of the Gothic Literary Studies series
Spectral Spain examines the Gothic haunting motif in post-Franco Spanish literature. With a theoretical framework in memory and trauma studies, and a particular emphasis on the inclusion of women's voices, this book is the first to provide an in-depth study of spectrality and haunting in the Gothic literature of contemporary Spain. Through close readings of eleven main texts, the author examines haunting as the perfect motif for Spanish authors to portray the tension between modernity and the imposition of a monocultural, nationalised tradition throughout the twentieth century – noting not just the trauma of the civil war and resulting dictatorship of Franco, but also the continuing and widespread disenchantment during and after the Transition. Through its references to the contemporary debate surrounding historical memory, Spectral Spain demonstrates the relevance of the Gothic in Spanish literature, and the continued ghostly returns of the past in the socio-political anxieties of the present.
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The Brontës As Gothic Writers
The Afflicted Imagination
by James Thomas Quinnell
Part of the Gothic Literary Studies series
This book is the first extended study of the importance of Gothic for an appreciation of the Brontës' writing. It resituates Gothic from the mode that gives the pleasing sensation of terror to being the source of the Brontës' deepest preoccupations – it is the mode they use to register anxieties and fears. This monograph, through a consideration of Gothic states and places, explores the Brontës' creative work with the genre. The author argues that to read the Brontës as Gothic poets and novelists is also to read them as post-Romantics, as they respond to the Gothic imaginations of such Romantic poets as Wordsworth, Coleridge and Shelley. Gothic in the Brontës, then, is not merely a collection of tropes or even an aesthetic, but a way in which they read the world.
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Gothic Precarity
Fear And Anxiety In Twenty-first-century Fiction
by Timothy Rideout
Part of the Gothic Literary Studies series
Ours is an age of precarity, as fear and anxiety have come to define the twenty-first century. Politically, economically and socially, the neoliberal orthodoxy has become globally dominant and, as a direct result, traditional frameworks of protection have been dismantled, while existential insecurity is increasingly passed from nations and institutions to individuals. In the meantime, the Gothic mode of fiction is experiencing a new ascendancy, strengthening the argument that the Gothic represents the best literary mode with which to decode this age of precarity. In this context, the present study offers a groundbreaking examination of the Gothic mode's conceptual affinity with notions of neoliberal precarity. Exploring twenty-first-century Gothic fiction's engagement with the most pressing issues of our age, it considers the oppression and existential entrapment experienced by marginalised populations in the provincial China of the late 1970s, and observes a modern-day Frankenstein's creature occasion violence and destruction across Baghdad post the 2003 Iraq War. The reader will also discover vampires (representatives of a voracious, toxic economic model) in an alternate Mexico City, encounter a nomadic group traversing the only remaining wilderness in a near-future North America devastated as a result of the climate crisis, and be haunted by a spectral migrant who died in their efforts to flee political oppression in Vietnam.
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The Gothic at War
Masculinity In Conflict, 1760 - 1818
by Lauren J. Nixon
Part of the Gothic Literary Studies series
This is an in depth exploration of how the Gothic literature boom of the late-eighteenth century was a response and reaction to the expansion of the British empire, and to the continued periods of war in the second half of the century. The Gothic has often been discussed in relation to the French Revolution as a literature of terror, but The Gothic at War demonstrates how the works of Gothic writers such as Horace Walpole, Charlotte Smith and Ann Radcliffe were also a literature of conflict. This study places a particular focus on masculinity and national identity, analysing how the representations of war and the figure of the soldier in the Gothic of the era allowed women writers in particular to explore anxieties about manliness and nationality.
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Gothic Mētis
Cunning Monstrosity, Shapeshifting And Subversion Linking The Nineteenth Century To The Present
by Natasha Rebry Coulthard
Part of the Gothic Literary Studies series
Exhuming and reanimating an obscure ancient cunning associated with the monstrous, the hybrid, the feminine and the nonhuman, this study proposes a novel transdisciplinary framework for analysing Gothic media and discourse through the lens of mētis. Mētis denotes a wily, adaptive intelligence shared by tricksters, humans, nonhumans and objects, characterised by shapeshifting, twists and duplicity – it is also an artful praxis for blurring categories, embracing multiplicity, navigating difference and subverting authority. Using mētis as both theme and method, Gothic Mētis weaves together myth, literature, rhetorical theory and critical posthumanism, to analyse Gothic character and narration from the nineteenth century to the present while developing a post-anthropocentric praxis for representing, navigating and ultimately subverting the Anthropocene. Reading Gothic alongside and through mētis-and mētis alongside and through Gothic-this book highlights the Gothic mode as a timely, artful response to the rise of the Anthropocene, rendering a post-anthropocentric world beyond Man.
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Monstrous Textualities
Writing the Other in Gothic Narratives of Resistance
by Anya Heise-von der Lippe
Part of the Gothic Literary Studies series
Monstrous textuality emerges when Gothic narratives like Frankenstein reflect the monstrous in their narrative structure to create narratives of resistance. It allows writers to meta-narratively reflect their own poetics and textual production, and reclaim authority over their work under circumstances of systemic cultural oppression and Othering. This book traces the representation of other Others through Black feminist hauntology in Toni Morrison's Beloved (1987) and Love (2003); it explores fat freak embodiment as a feminist resistance strategy in Angela Carter's Nights at the Circus (1984) and Margaret Atwood's Lady Oracle (1976); and it reads Atwood's MaddAddam trilogy (2003—13) and Shelley Jackson's Patchwork Girl (1995) within a framework of critical posthumanist and cyborg theory. The result is a comprehensive argument about how these texts can be read within a framework of critical posthumanist questioning of knowledge production, and of epistemological exploration, beyond the exclusionary humanist paradigm.
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Shakespearean Gothic
by Various Authors
Part of the Gothic Literary Studies series
This book explores the paradox that the Gothic (today's werewolves, vampires, and horror movies) owe their origins (and their legitimacy) to eighteenth-century interpretations of Shakespeare. As Shakespeare was being established as the supreme British writer throughout the century, he was cited as justification for early Gothic writers' fascination with the supernatural, their abandoning of literary "decorum," and their fascination with otherness and extremes of every kind. This book addresses the gap for an up to date analysis of Shakespeare's relation to the Gothic. An authority on the Gothic, E.J. Clery, has stated that "It would be impossible to overestimate the importance of Shakespeare as touchstone and inspiration for the terror mode, even if we feel the offspring are unworthy of their parent. Scratch the surface of any Gothic fiction and the debt to Shakespeare will be there." This book therefore addresses Shakespeare's importance to the Gothic tradition as a whole and also to particular, well-known and often studied Gothic works. It also considers the influence of the Gothic on Shakespeare, both in-print and on stage in eighteenth-and nineteenth-century Britain. The introductory chapter places the chapters within the historical development of both Shakespearean reception and Gothic Studies. The book is divided into three parts: 1) Gothic Appropriations of "Shakespeare"; 2) Rewriting Shakespearean Plays and Characters; 3) Shakespeare Before/After the Gothic.
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South African Gothic
Anxiety and Creative Dissent in the Post-apartheid Imagination and Beyond
by Rebecca Duncan
Part of the Gothic Literary Studies series
The term 'Gothic' has rarely been brought to bear on contemporary South African fictions, appearing too fanciful for the often overtly political writing of apartheid and post-apartheid South Africa. As the first book-length exploration of Gothic impulses in South African literature, this volume accounts for the Gothic currents that run through South African imaginaries from the late-nineteenth century onwards. South African Gothic identifies an intensification in Gothic production that begins with the nascent decline of the apartheid state, and relates this to real anxieties that arise with the unfolding of social and political change. In the context of a South Africa unmaking and reshaping itself, Gothic emerges as a language for long-suppressed histories of violence, and for ongoing experiences at odds with utopian images of the new democracy. Its function is interrogative and ultimately creative: South African Gothic challenges narrow conceptions of the status quo to drive at alternative, less exclusionary visions.
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Minerva's Gothics
The Politics and Poetics of Romantic Exchange, 1780-1820
by Elizabeth Neiman
Part of the Gothic Literary Studies series
Between 1790 and 1820, William Lane's Minerva Press published an unprecedented number of circulating-library novels by obscure female authors. Because these novels catered to the day's fashion for sentimental themes and Gothic romance, they were and continue to be generally dismissed as ephemera. Recently, however, scholars interested in historicizing Romantic conceptions of genius and authorship have begun to write Minerva back into literary history. By making Minerva novels themselves the centre of the analysis, Minerva's Gothics illustrates how Romantic 'anxiety' is better conceptualized as a mutual though not entirely equitable 'exchange', a dynamic interrelationship between Minerva novels and Romantic-era politics and poetics that started in 1780, when Lane began publishing novels with some regularity. Reading Minerva novels for their shared popular conventions demonstrates that circulating-library novelists collectively recirculate, engage and modify commonplaces about women's nature, the social order and, most importantly, the very Romantic redefinitions of authorship and literature that render their novels not worth reading. By recognizing Minerva's collaborative rather than merely derivative authorial model, a forgotten pathway is restored between first-generation Romantic reactions to popular print culture and Percy Shelley's influential conceptualization of the poet in A Defence of Poetry.
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American Gothic Art and Architecture in the Age of Romantic Literature
by Kerry Carso
Part of the Gothic Literary Studies series
“American Gothic Art and Architecture in the Age of Romantic Literature” analyses the influence of British Gothic novels and historical romances on American art and architecture in the Romantic era.
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The Twilight of the Gothic?
Vampire Fiction and the Rise of the Paranormal Romance, 19912012
by Joseph Crawford
Part of the Gothic Literary Studies series
This book explores the history of the paranormal romance genre; from its origins in the revisionist horror fiction of the 1970s, via its emergence as a minor sub-genre of romantic fiction in the early 1990s, to its contemporary expansion in recent years into an often-controversial genre of mainstream fiction. Tracing the genre from its roots in older Gothic fiction written by and for women, it explores the interconnected histories of Gothic and romantic fiction, from Ann Radcliffe and Jane Austen in the eighteenth century to Buffy, Twilight, True Blood and The Vampire Diaries in the present day. In doing so, it investigates the extent to which the post-Twilight paranormal romance really does represent a break from older traditions of Gothic fiction—and just what it is about the genre that has made it so extraordinarily divisive, captivating millions of readers whilst simultaneously infuriating and repelling so many others.
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Wilkie Collins, Medicine and the Gothic
by Laurence Talairach-Vielmas
Part of the Gothic Literary Studies series
This book examines how Wilkie Collins's interest in medical matters developed in his writing through exploration of his revisions of the late eighteenth-century Gothic novel from his first sensation novels to his last novels of the 1880s. Throughout his career, Collins made changes in the prototypical Gothic scenario. The aristocratic villains, victimized maidens and medieval castles of classic Gothic tales were reworked and adapted to thrill his Victorian readership. With the advances of neuroscience and the development of criminology as a significant backdrop to most of his novels, Collins drew upon contemporary anxieties and increasingly used the medical to propel his criminal plots. While the prototypical castles were turned into modern medical institutions, his heroines no longer feared ghosts but the scientist's knife. This study hence underlines the way in which Collins's Gothic revisions increasingly tackled medical questions, using the medical terrain to capitalize on the readers' fears. It also demonstrates how Wilkie Collins's fiction reworks Gothic themes and presents them through the prism of contemporary scientific, medical and psychological discourses, from debates revolving around mental physiology to those dealing with heredity and transmission. The book's structure is chronological covering a selection of texts in each chapter, with a balance between discussion of the more canonical of Collins's texts such as The Woman in White, The Moonstone and Armadale and some of his more neglected writings.
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The Gothic Ideology
Religious Hysteria and Anti-catholicism in British Popular Fiction, 1780-1880
by Diane Hoeveler
Part of the Gothic Literary Studies series
The Gothic Ideology argues that in order to modernize and secularize, the British Protestant imaginary needed an 'other' against which it could define itself as a culture and a nation with distinct boundaries. The 'Gothic ideology' is identified as an intense religious anxiety, produced by the aftershocks of the Protestant reformation, the Catholic Counter-Reformation, and the dynastic upheavals produced by both events in England, Germany, and France, and was played out in hundreds of Gothic texts published throughout Europe between the mid-eighteenth century and 1880. This book is the first to read the Gothic ideology through the historical context of both King Henry VIII's dissolution of the monasteries and the extensive French anti-clerical and pornographic works that were well-known to Horace Walpole and Matthew Lewis. The book argues that Gothic was thoroughly invested in a crude form of anti-Catholicism that fed lower class prejudices against the passage of a variety of Catholic Relief Acts that had been pending in Parliament since 1788 and finally passed in 1829.
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Young Adult Gothic Fiction
Monstrous Selves/Monstrous Others
by Various Authors
Part of the Gothic Literary Studies series
This collection is the first to focus exclusively on twenty-first-century young adult Gothic fiction. The essays demonstrate how the contemporary resurgence of the Gothic signals anxieties about (and hopes for) young people in the twenty-first century. Changing conceptions of young adults as liminal figures, operating between the modes of child and adult, can be mobilised when combined with Gothic spaces and concepts in texts for young people. In young adult Gothic literature, the crossing of boundaries typical of the Gothic is often motivated by a heterosexual romance plot, in which the human or monstrous female protagonist desires a boy who is not her 'type'. Additionally, as the Gothic works to define what it means to be human—particularly in relation to gender, race, and identity—the volume also examines how contemporary shifts and flashpoints in identity politics are being negotiated under the metaphoric cloak of monstrosity.
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The Nature of the Beast
Transformations of the Werewolf From the 1970s to the Twenty-First Century
by Carys Crossen
Part of the Gothic Literary Studies series
The werewolf in popular fiction has begun to change rapidly. Literary critics have observed this development and its impact on the werewolf in fiction, with theorists arguing that the modern werewolf offers new possibilities about how we view identity and the self. Although this monograph is preoccupied with the same concerns, it represents a departure from other critical works by analysing the werewolf's subjectivity/identity as a work-in-progress, where the fixed and final form is yet to be arrived at—and may never be fully accomplished. Using the critical theories of Deleuze and Guattari and their concepts of 'multiplicities' and 'becoming', this work argues that the werewolf is in a state of constant evolution as it develops new modes of being in popular fiction. Following on from this examination of lycanthropic subjectivity, the book goes on to examine the significant developments that have resulted from the advent of the werewolf as subject, few of which have received any sustained critical attention to date.
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Gothic Utterance
Voice, Speech and Death in the American Gothic
by Jimmy Packham
Part of the Gothic Literary Studies series
The Gothic has always been interested in strange utterances and unsettling voices—from half-heard ghostly murmurings and the admonitions of the dead, to the terrible cries of the monstrous nonhuman. Gothic Utterance is the first book-length study of the role played by such voices in the Gothic tradition, exploring their prominence and importance in the American literature produced between the Revolutionary War and the close of the nineteenth century. The book argues that the American Gothic foregrounds the overpowering affect and distressing significations of the voices of the dead, dying, abjected, marginalised or nonhuman, in order to undertake a sustained interrogation of what it means to be and speak as an American in this period. The American Gothic imagines new forms of relation between speaking subjects, positing more inclusive and expansive kinds of community, while also emphasising the ethical demands attending our encounters with Gothic voices. The Gothic suggests that how we choose to hear and respond to these voices says much about our relationship with the world around us, its inhabitants—dead or otherwise—and the limits of our own subjectivity and empathy.
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Penny Dreadfuls and the Gothic
Investigations of Pernicious Tales of Terror
by Various Authors
Part of the Gothic Literary Studies series
Penny Dreadfuls and the Gothic breaks new ground in uncovering penny titles which have been hitherto largely neglected from literary discourse revealing the cultural, social and literary significance of these working-class texts. The present volume is a reappraisal of penny dreadfuls, demonstrating their cruciality in both our understanding of working-class Victorian Literature and the Gothic mode. This edited collection of essays provides new insights into the fields of Victorian literature, popular culture and Gothic fiction more broadly; it is divided into three sections, whose titles replicate the dual titles offered by penny publications during the nineteenth century. Sections one and two consist of three chapters, while section three consists of four essays, all of which intertwine to create an in-depth and intertextual exposition of Victorian society, literature, and gothic representations.
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Female Gothic Histories
Gender, Histories and the Gothic
by Diana Wallace
Part of the Gothic Literary Studies series
Female Gothic Histories traces the development of women's Gothic historical fiction from Sophia Lee's The Recess in the late eighteenth century through the work of Elizabeth Gaskell, Vernon Lee, Daphne du Maurier and Victoria Holt to the bestselling novels of Sarah Waters in the twenty-first century. Often left out of traditional historical narratives, women writers have turned to Gothic historical fiction as a mode of writing which can both reinsert them into history and symbolise their exclusion. This study breaks new ground in bringing together thinking about the Gothic and the historical novel, and in combining psychoanalytic theory with historical contextualisation.
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Canadian Gothic
Literature, History, and the Spectre of Self-Invention
by Cynthia Sugars
Part of the Gothic Literary Studies series
This book explores the Gothic tradition in Canadian literature by tracing a distinctive reworking of the British Gothic in Canada. It traces the ways the Gothic genre was reinvented for a specifically Canadian context. On the one hand, Canadian writers expressed anxiety about the applicability of the British Gothic tradition to the colonies; on the other, they turned to the Gothic for its vitalising rather than unsettling potential. After charting this history of Gothic infusion, Canadian Gothic turns its attention to the body of Aboriginal and diasporic writings that respond to this discourse of national self-invention from a post-colonial perspective. These counter-narratives unsettle the naturalising force of this invented history, rendering the sense of Gothic comfort newly strange. The Canadian Gothic tradition has thus been a conflicted one, which reimagines the Gothic as a form of cultural sustenance. This volume offers an important reconsideration of the Gothic legacy in Canada.
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Gothic Metaphysics
From Alchemy to the Anthropocene
by Jodey Castricano
Part of the Gothic Literary Studies series
Gothic Metaphysics is a radical departure from Freudian-centred criticism of Gothic literature. It aims to explore our modern dilemma in the time of the Anthropocene, by bringing to light the role of Gothic since its inception in 1764 in holding space for a worldview familiar to certain mystical traditions—such as alchemy, which held to the view of a living cosmos yet later deemed 'uncanny' and anachronistic by Freud. In developing this idea, Gothic Metaphysics explores the influence of the Middle Ages on the emergence of Gothic, seeing it as an encrypted genre that serves as the site of a 'live burial' of 'animism', which has emerged in the notion of 'quantum entanglement' best described by Carl G. Jung and physicist Wolfgang Pauli in the theory of synchronicity linking alchemy with quantum mechanics. This relationship finds itself in dialogue with the Gothic's long-held concern for the 'sentience of space and place', as described by renowned Gothic scholar Fredrick Frank. The volume Gothic Metaphysics is multi-valent and explores how Gothic has sustained the view of a sentient world despite the disqualification of nature—not only in respect to the extirpation of animism as a worldview, but also with regard to an affirmation of consciousness beyond that of human exceptionalism.
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Stephen King's Gothic
by John Sears
Part of the Gothic Literary Studies series
Explores the works of Stephen King, one of the world's best-selling horror writers, through the lenses offered by contemporary literary and cultural theory. This title argues that King's writing explores many of the issues analysed by critics and philosophers.
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Gothic Music
The Sounds of the Uncanny
by Isabella Elferen
Part of the Gothic Literary Studies series
Gothic Music: The Sounds of the Uncanny traces sonic Gothic from the echoing footsteps in Gothic novels to the dark soundscapes of Goth club nights. This broad perspective importantly widens the scope of Gothic music from Goth subculture to literature, film, television and video games. This book also provides the musical and theoretical definition of Gothic music that lacks in current scholarship. Whether voicing the spectral beings of early cinema, announcing virtual terrors in video games, or intensifying the nocturnal rituals of Goth, Gothic music represents the sounds of the uncanny.
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The Haunted States of America
Gothic Regionalism in Post-war American Fiction
by James Morgart
Part of the Gothic Literary Studies series
Prior studies of post-war American Gothic literature (and even American horror films) have primarily interpreted Gothic cultural production of the post-war period through a Cold War lens. Despite legitimate reasons for such an approach, this emphasis has limited inquiries into post-war fiction as well as our understanding of the nation's complicated identity. While the federal government and its investigative agencies may have been preoccupied with the so-called 'red menace' that threatened to spread across the planet, each region of the country already possessed major strains of Gothic fiction that focused on regional anxieties—namely of those connected to women and minorities that threatened the region's constructed identity and balance of power. The Haunted States of America shifts the focus to these Gothic strains by examining how the anxieties, fears and concerns illustrated in the works of several post-World War II writers can be best understood through regional history and identity.
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Women's Authorship and the Early Gothic
Legacies and Innovations
by Various Authors
Part of the Gothic Literary Studies series
This edited collection examines Gothic works written by women authors in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, with a specific focus on the novels and chapbooks produced by less widely commercially and critically popular writers. Bringing these authors to the forefront of contemporary critical examinations of the Gothic, chapters in this collection examine how these works impacted the development of 'women's writing' and Gothic writing during this time. Offering readers an original look at the literary landscape of the period and the roles of the creative women who defined it, the collection argues that such works reflected a female-centred literary subculture defined by creative exchange and innovation, one that still shapes perceptions of the Gothic mode today. This collection, then, presents an alternative understanding of the legacy of women Gothic authors, anchoring this understanding in complex historical and social contexts and providing a new world of Gothic literature for readers to explore.
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Gothic Britain
Dark Places in the Provinces and Margins of the British Isles
by Various Authors
Part of the Gothic Literary Studies series
Gothic Britain is the first collection of essays to consider how the Gothic responds to, and is informed by, the British regional experience. Acknowledging how the so-called United Kingdom has historically been divided on nationalistic lines, the twelve original essays in this volume interrogate the interplay of ideas and generic innovations generated in the spaces between the nominal kingdom and its component nations and, innovatively, within those national spaces. Concentrating upon fictions depicting England, Scotland and Wales specifically, Gothic Britain comprehends the generic possibilities of the urban and the rural, of the historical and the contemporary, of the metropolis and the rural settlement—as well as exploring uniquely the fluid space that is the act of travel itself. Reading the textuality of some two hundred years of national and regional identity, Gothic Britain interrogates how the genre has depicted and questioned the natural and built environments of the island of Britain.
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Middle Eastern Gothics
Literature, Spectral Modernities and the Restless Past
by Various Authors
Part of the Gothic Literary Studies series
• The chapters in this study cover the four major Middle Eastern languages (Arabic, Hebrew, Persian, and Turkish) and are authored by experts in these literatures, who read and engage with these texts in their original languages. Their intimate knowledge of the linguistic and cultural contexts of the works they analyse provides readers access to nuances in the texts and, ultimately, to a more profound understanding of them.
• This is the first cohesive collection addressing the Gothic in the geographic/linguistic context of the Middle East region. There has been increased interest not only in global iterations of the Gothic but also in Middle Eastern writing, particularly when it intersects with the Gothic (i.e. Frankenstein in Baghdad).
• The Introduction of the volume offers a new theorisation of Gothic literature, proposing the "transnational region" as a frame for reading literary texts that cross national and linguistic boundaries.
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Cornish Gothic, 1830-1913
by Joan Passey
Part of the Gothic Literary Studies series
This book asks why so many authors drew on Cornwall for inspiration across the long nineteenth century, and considers the seismic cultural changes in Cornwall that spurred this interest—from the collapse of the mining industry to the developing national rail network; from the birth of tourism to the neomedieval rise in interest in King Arthur. Understanding frequently overlooked Cornwall in this period is vital to understanding Gothic literature, the Victorian imagination, intellectual and creative networks, and attitudes towards regionality. The first part of the book considers landscape and legend, defining a mining Gothic tradition, exposing the shipwreck as Gothic mastertrope, and demonstrating how antiquarians drew from Cornish legends and lore. The second part explores encounters with modernity, investigating the impact of railway expansion on access to Cornwall, the development of a Cornish King Arthur as a key figure of Victorian masculinity, and the specific features of the Cornish ghost story.
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Gothic Chapbooks, Bluebooks and Shilling Shockers, 1797–1830
by Franz J. Potter
Part of the Gothic Literary Studies series
This study breaks new ground surveying the origins of the Gothic chapbook, its publishers and authors, in order to establish conclusively the impact these pamphlets had on the development of the Gothic genre. Considered the illegitimate offspring of the Gothic novel, the lowly chapbook flooded the market in the late eighteenth century, creating a separate and distinct secondary market for tales of terror. The trade was driven by a handful of individuals who were booksellers and dealers, circulating library proprietors, stationers, and small publishers—what they produced were more than four hundred chapbooks, bluebooks and shilling shockers containing Gothic tales from magazines, redactions of popular novels, extractions of entire inset tales, and original tales of terror. This book responds to the urgent and pressing need to contextualise the Gothic chapbook in ascertaining a more concise and comprehensive view of the entire Gothic genre.
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Servants and the Gothic, 1764-1831
A half-told tale
by Kathleen Hudson
Part of the Gothic Literary Studies series
This volume provides readers with a comprehensive literary and historical basis for understanding servant characters and servant narratives in the early Gothic mode. Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, servants were 'othered' figures whose voices had the potential to undermine socio-political and personal identity. This study recasts servant characters within the early Gothic mode as 'narrators' who verbally or non-verbally perform dialogue, moral insights and folkloric or gossip-based stories. Examining the development of servant narrative within the early Gothic mode, Servants and the Gothic outlines the socio-historical and literary influences which defined the servant voice during the eighteenth century, as well as identifying and expanding upon the ways in which servant narratives contributed to each author's unique goals. It redefines servant narratives as a Gothic 'performance', a self-conscious self-examination of the ways in which a Gothic narrative impacts literary, social and personal identity.
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The Gothic and the Carnivalesque in American Culture
by Timothy Jones
Part of the Gothic Literary Studies series
The Gothic and the Carnivalesque in American Culture offers a new account of the American Gothic. Gothic studies, the field that explores horrid and frightful narratives, usually describes the genre as exploring genuine historical fears, crises and traumas, yet this does not account for the ways in which the genre is often a source of wicked delight as much as it is of horror—its audiences laugh as often as they shriek. This book traces the carnivalesque tradition in the American Gothic from the nineteenth into the late twentieth century. It discusses the festivals offered by Poe, Hawthorne and Irving; the celebrations of wickedness offered by the Weird Tales writers, including H. P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard and Clark Ashton Smith; the curious aura attached to Ray Bradbury's stories; the way in which hosted horrors in comics and on television in the 1950s and 1960s taught their mass audiences how to read the genre; Stephen King's nurturing of a new audience for Gothic carnivals in the 1970s and 1980s; and the confluence of Gothic story and Goth subculture in the 1990s.
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Gothic Invasions
Imperialism, War and Fin-de-Siècle Popular Fiction
by Ailise Bulfin
Part of the Gothic Literary Studies series
What do tales of stalking vampires, restless Egyptian mummies, foreign master criminals, barbarian Eastern hordes and stomping Prussian soldiers have in common? As Gothic Invasions explains, they may all be seen as instances of invasion fiction, a paranoid fin-de-siècle popular literary phenomenon that responded to prevalent societal fears of the invasion of Britain by an array of hostile foreign forces in the period before the First World War. Gothic Invasions traces the roots of invasion anxiety to concerns about the downside of Britain's continuing imperial expansion: fears of growing inter-European rivalry and colonial wars and rebellion. It explores how these fears circulated across the British empire and were expressed in fictional narratives drawing strongly upon and reciprocally transforming the conventions and themes of gothic writing. Gothic Invasions enhances our understanding of the interchange between popular culture and politics at this crucial historical juncture, and demonstrates the instrumentality of the ever-versatile and politically-charged gothic mode in this process.
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Body Gothic
Corporeal Transgression in Contemporary Literature and Horror Film
by Xavier Aldana Reyes
Part of the Gothic Literary Studies series
The gothic, particularly in its contemporary incarnations, is often constructed around largely disembodied concepts such as spectrality or the haunted. Body Gothic offers a counter-narrative that reinstates the importance of viscerality to the gothic mode. It argues that contemporary discourses surrounding our bodies are crucial to our understanding of the social messages in fictional mutilation and of the pleasures we may derive from it. This book considers a number of literary and cinematic movements that have, over the past three decades, purposely turned the body into a meaningful gothic topos. Each chapter in Body Gothic is dedicated to a different corporeal subgenre: splatterpunk, body horror, the new avant-pulp, the slaughterhouse novel, torture porn and surgical horror are all covered in its pages. Close readings of key texts by Clive Barker, Richard Laymon, Joseph D'Lacey, Matthew Stokoe, Tony White or Stanley Manly are provided alongside in-depth analyses of landmark films such as Re-Animator (1985), The Fly (1986), Saw (2004), Hostel (2005), The Human Centipede (2011) and American Mary (2012).
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The Gothic Condition
Terror, History and the Psyche
by David Punter
Part of the Gothic Literary Studies series
This book brings together fourteen of the most ambitious and thought-provoking recent essays by David Punter, who has been writing on the Gothic to academic and general acclaim for over thirty years. Punter addresses developments in Gothic writing and Gothic criticism since the mid-eighteenth century, by isolating and discussing specific themes and scenarios that have remained relevant to literary and philosophical discussion over the decades and centuries, and also by paying close attention to the motifs, figures and recurrences that loom so large in twenty-first-century engagements with the Gothic. This book, while engaging deeply with Gothic history, constantly addresses our continuing immediate encounters with Gothic tropes—the vampire, the zombie, the phantom, the living dead.
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The Fantastic and European Gothic
History, Literature and the French Revolution
by Matthew Gibson
Part of the Gothic Literary Studies series
This book examines the rise of Fantastic literature on the continent in the nineteenth century, the development of a European Gothic and the influence which this exerted on British writers. By examining writers like Nodier, Hoffmann, Gautier, Féval and Stevenson, the book argues firstly how their writings subvert entirely the view of the Fantastic accepted by Todorov, Punter and others, to show that it is the reversal of a pre-Enlightenment, spiritual world-view which causes terror in these works, and further demonstrates that Gothic novels frequently use allusion and anachronism to portray a cyclical view of history opposed to that of Scott.
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Uncanny Youth
Childhood, the Gothic, and the Literary Americas
by Suzanne Manizza Roszak
Part of the Gothic Literary Studies series
Within the Euro-American literary tradition, Gothic stories of childhood and adolescence have often served as a tool for cultural propaganda, advancing colonialist, white supremacist and patriarchal ideologies. This book turns our attention to modern and contemporary Gothic texts by hemispheric American writers who have refigured uncanny youth in ways that invert these cultural scripts. In the hands of authors ranging from Octavio Paz and Maryse Condé to N. Scott Momaday and Carmen Maria Machado, Gothic conventions become a means of critiquing pathological structures of power in the space of the Americas. As fictional children and adolescents defy persisting colonial and neo-imperialist architectures, navigate rigged systems of socioeconomic power, and attempt to frustrate patterns of gendered, anti-queer violence, the uncanny and the nightmarish in their lives call on readers to reckon with and resist these intersecting forms of injustice.
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Gothic Remains
Corpses, Terror and Anatomical Culture, 17641897
by Laurence Talairach
Part of the Gothic Literary Studies series
The Gothic has always been fascinated with objects carrying with them a sense of horror—the decomposing body, the rigid corpse, the bleeding statue, the spectral skeleton—capable of creating a sublime form of beauty. Gothic Remains: Corpses, Terror and Anatomical Culture, 1764—1897 offers an exploration of those Gothic tropes and conventions that were most thoroughly steeped in the anatomical culture of the period—from skeletons, used to understand human anatomy, to pathological human remains exhibited in medical museums; from bodysnatching aimed at providing dissection subjects, to live-burials resulting from medical misdiagnoses and pointing to contemporary research into the signs of death.
The historicist reading of canonical and less-known Gothic texts proposed throughout Gothic Remains, explored through the prism of anatomy, seeks to offer new insights into the ways in which medical practice and the medical sciences informed the aesthetics of pain and death typically read therein, and the two-way traffic that emerged between medical literature and literary texts.
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Romantic Medicine and the Gothic Imagination
Morbid Anatomies
by Laura R. Kremmel
Part of the Gothic Literary Studies series
This book debates a crossover between the Gothic and the medical imagination in the Romantic period. It explores the gore and uncertainty typical of medical experimentation, and expands the possibilities of medical theories in a speculative space by a focus on Gothic novels, short stories, poetry, drama and chapbooks. By comparing the Gothic's collection of unsavoury tropes to morbid anatomy's collection of diseased organs, the author argues that the Gothic's prioritisation of fear and gore gives it access to nonnormative bodies, reallocating medical and narrative agency to bodies considered otherwise powerless. Each chapter pairs a trope with a critical medical debate, granting silenced bodies power over their own narratives: the reanimated corpse confronts fears about vitalism; the skeleton exposes fears about pain; the unreliable corpse feeds on fears of dissection; the devil redirects fears about disability; the dangerous narrative manipulates fears of contagion and vaccination.
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Australian Gothic
A Cinema of Horrors
by Jonathan Rayner
Part of the Gothic Literary Studies series
• The book reads the Gothic characteristics of Australian cinema within their national, cultural context.
• The book relates the key motifs and concerns of Gothic literature to the styles, narratives and significance of Australian films.
• The book places examples of Australian Gothic film within the Australian filmmaking and film criticism, and relates these to the wider trends of international horror film.
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The New Queer Gothic
Reading Queer Girls and Women in Contemporary Fiction and Film
by Robyn Ollett
Part of the Gothic Literary Studies series
Queer theory, queer literary criticism and queer cultural criticism often focus on western, white, cis men. This book provides the first in-depth analysis of contemporary queer and Gothic texts that focus on the subjectivity, characterisation and representation of queer girls and women. The New Queer Gothic applies interdisciplinary theory to offer a new mode and method of reading literary and film fiction. From monstrous femininity in tales of girlhood, to paranoid negativity and transformation in young womanhood, through to postcolonial doubles, hybrid assimilation, corporeal possession, and final girls at the end of everything – this book takes as its canon works from the past fifteen years concerning queer and questioning girls and women in Gothic settings and narratives, to elucidate upon questions of queer feminist ethics, biopower and global identity politics.
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Gothic Melville
by Various Authors
Part of the Gothic Literary Studies series
In a famous review of Nathaniel Hawthorne's Mosses from an Old Manse, Herman Melville took the critics to task for missing the darkness as the heart of Hawthorne's writing – a blackness 'ten times black', as Melville put it, that fascinated him. Ironically, Melville has been subject to the same treatment by critics who have in large measure steered clear of Melville's own darkness. The contributors to Gothic Melville reveal that, if Hawthorne's darkness is ten times black, then Melville's is a hundred times so, as his works repeatedly raise questions about what the truth is or if truth exists at all.
This edited collection of scholarly essays makes up for the critical neglect of Melville's Gothicism by arguing that the Gothic is so extensively interwoven into the fabric of his writing that Melville must at last be recognised as among the genre's most important practitioners.
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Gothic Literary Travel and Tourism
by Alex Bevan
Part of the Gothic Literary Studies series
Gothic tourism is a growing phenomenon and a medium through which Gothic fictions and folkloric tales are re-imagined and generated. This book examines the complex relationship between contemporary English Gothic attractions and storytelling, uncovering how works of Gothic fiction can both inspire Gothic tourism and emerge from the spaces of Gothic tourism, contending that Gothic tourist attractions are multi-layered storytelling experiences. Contributing to the study of literature and place, Gothic Literary Travel and Tourism draws together the study of literary Gothic tourism and spatial philosophy, offering interdisciplinary analysis into the interface between Gothic narrative(s) and the spaces in which the tourist navigates. The storytelling practices taking place in Gothic caves, theme parks, ghost tours and rural walks serve to reflect contemporary fears and anxieties. This book situates the act of touring a Gothic site as a process of literary and social discovery.
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Welsh Gothic
by Jane Aaron
Part of the Gothic Literary Studies series
Welsh Gothic, the first study of its kind, introduces readers to the array of Welsh Gothic literature published from 1780 to the present day. Informed by postcolonial and psychoanalytic theory, it argues that many of the fears encoded in Welsh Gothic writing are specific to the history of Welsh people, telling us much about the changing ways in which Welsh people have historically seen themselves and been perceived by others. The first part of the book explores Welsh Gothic writing from its beginnings in the last decades of the eighteenth century to 1997. The second part focuses on figures specific to the Welsh Gothic genre who enter literature from folk lore and local superstition, such as the sin-eater, cŵn Annwn (hellhounds), dark druids and Welsh witches.