Böcker i Gothic Literary Studies-serien

The term 'Gothic' has been applied to examples of Australian cinema since the 1970s, often in arbitrary and divergent ways. This book examines a wide range of Australian films to trace their Gothic resemblances, characteristics and meanings. Concentrating on the occurrence of Gothic motifs, characters, landscapes and narratives, it argues for the recognition and relevance of a coherent Gothic heritage in Australian film. Considering a plethora of Gothic representatives in relation to four consistent and illuminating continuities (images of the family, ideas of monstrosity, generic hybridity and the occurrence of the sublime), this study investigates the appearance and asserts the significance of Australian Gothic films within their national, cultural, literary and cinematic traditions.

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 Conde 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.

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.

This collection aims to resurrect the long-forgotten penny dreadfuls and revivify their significance in Gothic studies.

Gothic literature is very popular today, and many places have become tourist attractions because they are either connected to Gothic fictions or because they generate new Gothic storytelling experiences. This book explores the socio-political significance of Gothic tourism in England.

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.

South Asian Gothic consists of chapters representing the diversity of the region, and a number of ways in which Gothic manifests in contemporary South Asian cultures.

The Gothic is more than just maidens-in-peril fleeing supernatural villains in another age. Historically, it was a form used to depict and critique the dangerous labour conditions faced by workers during the Industrial Revolution.

Monster texts like Frankenstein reflect monstrosity in their narrative structure to create narratives of resistance against systemic cultural oppression. This book uses different critical theories to trace these narrative patterns in novels by Toni Morrison, Margaret Atwood and Angela Carter.

Gothic Utterance explores the vital role played by haunted and haunting voices in American Gothic literature produced between the Revolutionary War and the close of the nineteenth century, discussing pressing questions of national identity and subjecthood, and emphasising the ethical value of listening to unsettling or distressing voices.

The Haunted States of America: Gothic Regionalism in Post-war American fiction focuses on existing regional Gothic strains to examine 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.

This collection examines young adult Gothic fiction to demonstrate how the contemporary resurgence of the Gothic in texts for young people signals anxieties about, and hopes for, young people in the twenty-first century.

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.

This volume examines a selection of the most complex and important servant characters and servant narratives in early Gothic literature. It defines servant narratives as a Gothic `performance', and examines such servants' impact on literary, social and personal identity.

Gothic Invasions investigates the prevalent concern with invasion and war in fin-de-siecle British popular fiction, identifies the role of imperial expansion in generating fears of invasion, and explores how these fears were expressed transgenerically in narratives of invasion drawing strongly upon the conventions and themes of gothic writing.

The first book-length study of its kind, South African Gothic maps the poetics, origins and functions of an underexplored Gothic tradition in South African literary imaginaries.

Gothic Contemporaries: The Haunted Text is the first of its kind to align selected 21st century fiction with a revised understanding of the gothic through themes such as signification, communication, ethics, inheritance and currency.

Offers an introduction to British Gothic literature. This book examines works by Gothic authors such as Horace Walpole, Matthew Lewis, Ann Radcliffe, William Godwin and Mary Shelley against the backdrop of eighteenth-and-nineteenth-century British social and political history.

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.

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.Introduction: BallyhooChapter One: Theory, Practice and Gothic CarnivalChapter Two: 'The Delight of its Horror' - Poe's Carnivals and the Nineteenth-Century American GothicChapter Three: Weird Tales and Pulp SubjunctivityChapter Four: Ray Bradbury and the October AuraChapter Five: Hosted Horrors of the 1950s and 1960sChapter Six: Stephen King, Affect and the Real Limits of Gothic PracticeChapter Seven: Every Day is Halloween - Goth and the GothicConclusion: Waiting for the Great Pumpkin

American Gothic Art and Architecture in the Age of Romantic Literature analyses the impact British Gothic novels and historical romances had on American art and architecture in the Romantic era. Key figures include Thomas Jefferson, Washington Allston, Alexander Jackson Davis, James Fenimore Cooper, Washington Irving, Thomas Cole, Edwin Forrest and Nathaniel Hawthorne. Hawthorne articulated the subject of this book when he wrote that he could understand Sir Walter Scott's romances better after viewing Scott's Gothic Revival house Abbotsford, and he understood the house better for having read the romances. This study investigates this symbiotic relationship between the arts and Gothic literature to reveal new interpretative possibilities.ContentsIntroductionChapter One. Gothic Monticello: Thomas Jefferson's Garden NarrativesChapter Two. 'Banditti Mania': The Gothic Haunting of Washington Allston Chapter Three. 'Arranging the Trap Doors': The Gothic Revival Castles of Alexander Jackson DavisChapter Four. Old Dwellings Transmogrified: The Homes of James Fenimore Cooper and Washington IrvingChapter Five. Gothic Castles in the Landscape: Thomas Cole, Sir Walter Scott And the Hudson River School of PaintingChapter Six. The Theatrical Spectacle of Medieval Revival: Edwin Forrest's Fonthill CastleConclusion. 'Clap It Into a Romance:' Nathaniel Hawthorne's Gothic Houses

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).ContentsIntroduction: From Gothic Bodies to Body GothicChapter 1 - SplatterpunkChapter 2 - Body HorrorChapter 3 - The New Avant-PulpChapter 4 - The Slaughterhouse NovelChapter 5 - Torture PornChapter 6 - Surgical HorrorConclusion: The Gothic and the BodyNotesWorks CitedFilmography

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.

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.

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, cwn Annwn (hellhounds), dark druids and Welsh witches.ContentsPrologue: 'A Long Terror'PART I: HAUNTED BY HISTORY1. Cambria Gothica (1780s-1820s)2. An Underworld of One's Own (1830s-1900s).3. Haunted Communities (1900s-1940s).4. Land of the Living Dead (1940s-1997).PART II: 'THINGS THAT GO BUMP IN THE CELTIC TWILIGHT'5. Witches, Druids and the Hounds of Annwn.6. The Sin-eaterEpilogue: Post-devolution GothicNotesSelect BibliographyIndex

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.

Female Gothic Histories: Gender, History and the Gothic is an innovative new study of the ways in which women writers have used Gothic historical fiction to symbolise and counter their exclusion from traditional historical narratives.

This iconoclastic book challenges and changes accepted opinions about the Gothic novel, and will introduce the British and American Reader to works hitherto unknown to them, but rivals in quality to the works of writers like Radcliffe, Lewis and Stoker.

Queer Others in Victorian Gothic: Transgressing Monstrosity explores the intersections of Gothic, cultural, gender, queer, socio-economic and postcolonial theories in nineteenth-century British representations of sexuality, gender, class and race. From mid-century authors like Wilkie Collins and Elizabeth Gaskell to fin-de-siecle writers such as J. Sheridan Le Fanu, Florence Marryat and Vernon Lee, this study examines the ways that these Victorian writers utilized gothic horror as a proverbial 'safe space' in which to grapple with taboo social and cultural issues. This work simultaneously explores our current assumptions about a Victorian culture that was monolithic in its disdain for those who were 'other'.

This volume investigates the roles played by the concept of the uncanny, as defined by Sigmund Freud and other theorists, in the representation of lesbian and male gay sexualities and transgender in a selection of contemporary British, American and Caribbean fiction published 1980-2007.