This collection brings together key writings which convey the breadth of what is understood to be Gothic, and the ways in which it has produced, reinforced, and undermined received ideas about literature and culture. In addition to its interests in the late eighteenth-century origins of the form, this collection anthologizes path-breaking essays on most aspects of gothic production, including some of its nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first century manifestations across a broad range of cultural media.
This collection brings together key writings which convey the breadth of what is understood to be Gothic, and the ways in which it has produced, reinforced, and undermined received ideas about literature and culture. In addition to its interests in the late eighteenth-century origins of the form, this collection anthologizes path-breaking essays on most aspects of gothic production, including some of its nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first century manifestations across a broad range of cultural media.
The late 1960s and early 1970s saw the birth of modern feminism, the sexual revolution, and strong growth in the mass-market publishing industry. Women made up a large part of the book market, and Gothic fiction became a higher popular staple. Victoria Holt, Mary Stewart and Phyllis Whitney emerged as prominent authors, while the standardized paperback Gothic sold in the millions. Pitched at middle-class women of all ages, Gothics paved the way for contemporary fiction categories such as urban fantasy, paranormal romance and vampire erotica. Though not as popular today as they once were, Gothic paperbacks retain a cult following--and the books themselves have become collectors' items. They were also the first popular novels to present strong heroines as agents of liberation and transformation. This work offers the missing chapters of the Gothic story, from the imaginative creations of Ann Radcliffe and the Bronte sisters to the bestseller 50 Shades of Grey.
This book presents serious academic scholarship on Buffy the Vampire Slayer. It differs from other works because it uses Buffy as a primary text and not as a secondary instrument to explore other concepts. In doing so, it demonstrates that popular culture studies should be approached with the same serious attention that is paid to classic philosophy and other long-established fields. Essays assemble the Buffy canon and explore how Buffy treats Shakespeare, comics, power, sisterhood, apocalyptic revisionism, folklore, feminism, redemption, patriarchy, identity and education. Instructors considering this book for use in a course may request an examination copy here.
Comprehensive bibliography (1000+ items) is preceded by three critical essays, two by the editor and one by Devendra P. Varma, a scholar of Dracula and vampirism. A timely release considering the upsurge of interest in this field, and well done. Senf looks at why the vampire has evolved so significantly over the years and why in the 20th century it is primarily a character in popular literature while its 19th century counterpart was an important part of the literary mainstream. No index. Cloth edition, $32.95 (unseen). Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
In the context of the current explosion of interest in Gothic literature and popular culture, this interdisciplinary collection of essays explores for the first time the rich and long-standing relationship between war and the Gothic. Critics have described the global Seven Year’s War as the "crucible" from which the Gothic genre emerged in the eighteenth century. Since then, the Gothic has been a privileged mode for representing violence and extreme emotions and situations. Covering the period from the American Civil War to the War on Terror, this collection examines how the Gothic has provided writers an indispensable toolbox for narrating, critiquing, and representing real and fictional wars. The book also sheds light on the overlap and complicity between Gothic aesthetics and certain aspects of military experience, including the bodily violation and mental dissolution of combat, the dehumanization of "others," psychic numbing, masculinity in crisis, and the subjective experience of trauma and memory. Engaging with popular forms such as young adult literature, gaming, and comic books, as well as literature, film, and visual art, War Gothic provides an important and timely overview of war-themed Gothic art and narrative by respected experts in the field of Gothic Studies. This book makes important contributions to the fields of Gothic Literature, War Literature, Popular Culture, American Studies, and Film, Television & Media.
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.
This volume explores the intersection between culinary history and literature across a period of profound social and cultural change. Split into four parts, essays focus on the relationships between eating and childhood reading in the Victorian era, the role of hunger in depicting social instability and reform, the cultivation of taste through advertising and the formation of cultural legacies through imaginative and emotional experiences of food and drink. Contributors show that studying consumption is necessary for a full understanding of class, gender, national identity and the body. The works of writers such as Elizabeth Gaskell, Edward Lear, Isabella Beeton and Bram Stoker are considered alongside advice manuals, Home Front narratives and advertising to provide an innovative work that will be of interest to scholars of social, cultural and medical history as well as literary studies.
The Gothic has long been seen as offering a subversive challenge to the norms of realism. Locating both Gothic and mainstream Victorian fiction in a larger literary and cultural field, Peter K. Garrett argues that the oppositions usually posed between them are actually at work within both. He further shows how, by offering alternative versions of its stories, nineteenth-century Gothic fiction repeatedly reflects on narrative force, the power exerted by both writers and readers.Beginning with Poe's theory and practice of the Gothic tale as an exercise (or fantasy) of authorial power, Garrett then reads earlier eighteenth-century and Romantic Gothic fiction for comparable reflexive implications. Throughout, he stresses the ways authors doubled both characters and narrative perspectives to raise issues of power and authority in the tension between central deviant figures and social norms. Garrett then shows how the great nineteenth-century monster stories Frankenstein, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and Dracula self-consciously link the extremity and isolation of their deviant figures with the social groups they confront. These narratives, he argues, move from a Romantic concern with individual creation and responsibility to a Victorian affirmation of social solidarity that also reveals its dependence on the binding force of exclusionary violence. The final section of the book extends its investigation of Gothic reflections on narrative force into the more realistic social and psychological fiction of Dickens, Eliot, and James.
Against the social and economic upheavals that characterized the nineteenth century, the border-bending nosferatu embodied the period’s fears as well as its forbidden desires. This volume looks at both the range among and legacy of vampires in the nineteenth century, including race, culture, social upheaval, gender and sexuality, new knowledge and technology. The figure increased in popularity throughout the century and reached its climax in Dracula (1897), the most famous story of bloodsuckers. This book includes chapters on Bram Stoker’s iconic novel, as well as touchstone texts like John William Polidori’s The Vampyre (1819) and Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla (1872), but it also focuses on the many “Other” vampire stories of the period. Topics discussed include: the long-war veteran and aristocratic vampire in Varney; the vampire as addict in fiction by George MacDonald; time discipline in Eric Stenbock’s Studies of Death; fragile female vampires in works by Eliza Lynn Linton; the gender and sexual contract in Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s “Good Lady Ducayne;” cultural appropriation in Richard Burton’s Vikram and the Vampire; as well as Caribbean vampires and the racialized Other in Florence Marryat’s The Blood of the Vampire. While drawing attention to oft-overlooked stories, this study ultimately highlights the vampire as a cultural shape-shifter whose role as “Other” tells us much about Victorian culture and readers’ fears or desires.
