Böcker i Gothic Literary Studies-serien

This book provides new insights into how Gothic Horror as a whole started, and encourages the reader to think of the relations between such books and films as one vibrant set of energies.

Why, at a time when the majority of us no longer believe in ghosts, demons or the occult, does Gothic continue to have such a strong grasp upon literature, cinema and popular culture? This book answers the question by exploring some of the ways in which we have applied Gothic tropes to our everyday fears. The book opens with The Turn of the Screw, a text dealing in the dangers adults pose to children whilst simultaneously questioning the assumed innocence of all children. Staying with the domestic arena, it explores the various manifestations undertaken by the haunted house during the twentieth century, from the bombed-out spaces of the blitz ('The Demon Lover' and The Night Watch) to the designer bathrooms of wealthy American suburbia (What Lies Beneath). The monsters that emerge through the uncanny surfaces of the Gothic can also be terror monsters, and after a discussion of terrorism and atrocity in relation to burial alive, the book examines the relationship between the human and the inhuman through the role of the beast monster as manifestation of the evil that resides in our midst (The Hound of the Baskervilles and The Birds). It is with the dangers of the body that the Gothic has been most closely associated and, during the later twentieth century, paranoia attaches itself to skeletal forms and ghosts in the wake of the HIV/AIDS crisis. Sexuality and/as disease is one of the themes of Patrick McGrath's work (Dr Haggard's Disease and 'The Angel') and the issue of skeletons in the closet is also explored through Henry James's 'The Jolly Corner'. However, sexuality is also one of the most liberating aspects of Gothic narratives. After a brief discussion of camp humour in British television drama series Jekyll, the book concludes with a discussion of the apparitional lesbian through the work of Sarah Waters.

Stephen King is the world's best-selling horror writer. His work is ubiquitous on bookstore, supermarket, and personal library shelves and has been faithfully adapted into some of the most iconic horror films of the twentieth century. This study explores his writing through the lenses of contemporary literary and cultural theory. Through analyses of some of his best-known work, including "e;Carrie"e; and "e;Misery,"e; the authors argue that King offers ways of encountering and understanding some of our deepest fears about life and death, the past and the future, technological change, other people, monsters, ghosts, and the supernatural.This is the first extended critical-theoretical engagement with King's writing, and will be of interest to students, academics, and fans of horror fiction.

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.

Defining the American gothic tradition both within the context of the major movements of intellectual history over the past three-hundred years, as well as within the issues critical to American culture, this comprehensive volume covers a diverse terrain of well-known American writers, from Poe to Faulkner to Toni Morrison and Cormac McCarthy. Charles L. Crow demonstrates how the gothic provides a forum for discussing key issues of changing American culture, explores forbidden subjects, and provides a voice for the repressed and silenced.

Examines how themes and trends associated with the early Gothic novels were diffused in many genres in the Victorian period, including the ghost story, the detective story and the adventure story.

This book is a comparative study of British and American literature and culture in the 1790s and 1950s. It explores the republican tradition of the British Enlightenment and the effect of its translation and migration to the American colonies. Specifically, it examines in detail the transatlantic influence of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century libertarian and anti-authoritarian thought on British and American Revolutionary culture.

This collection examines Gothic fiction written by female authors in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Analysing works by lesser known authors within a historical context, the collection offers a fresh perspective on women writers and their contributions to Gothic literature.

Gothic Remains: Corpses, Terror and Anatomical Culture, 1764-1897 traces anatomical culture in Gothic texts from Horace Walpole to Bram Stoker, showing how the Gothic developed and evolved alongside the medical profession, and proposing a genealogy of some of the Gothic texts that marked the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

The infamously popular London publisher William Lane made a name for himself and his Press, 'Minerva', by courting debuting female authors and selling their novels wholesale as circulating-library collections. Minerva's Gothics puts Minerva novels back into conversation with each other and with the day's influential literary and philosophical texts.

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 upon 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 Great Britain.

Werewolves, Wolves and the Gothic explores the appearance of werewolves and wolves in literary and cultural texts from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. This collection brings together explorations of the gothic and questions of human-animal relations, issues of identity politics and ecological consciousness, opening up new areas within existing fields and forging links between them.

Posthuman Gothic is a collection of scholarly essays discussing literary and filmic representations of the posthuman Gothic.

Explores Postcolonial Gothic in four different locations, providing a comparative analysis of the way the Gothic has provided postcolonial writers with a means to express the anxieties of postcolonial experience and the traumatic legacies of colonialism, expressed through novels, short stories and poetry.

Challenges the critical view that Gothic is a vehicle for anti-Catholic, anticlerical sentiment. This book appeals the view that the Catholic motifs contained in Gothic novels (monks, nuns, abbeys, confessionals) signify anti-Catholic prejudice and anti-Church subversiveness on the part of the author and the audience.

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.

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..

This book explores why lecherous monks, evil nuns, dank torture chambers and haunted abbeys have filled the pages of gothic novels for two hundred years.