After 9/11, the world felt the “shock and awe” of the War on Terror. But that war also exploded inside novels, films, comics, and gaming. Danel Olson investigates why the paranormal, ghostly, and conspiratorial entered such media between 2002-2022, and how this Gothic presence connects to the most recent theories on PTSD. Set in New York/Gotham, Afghanistan, Iraq, and CIA black sites, the traumatic and weird works interrogated here ask how killing affects the killers. The protagonists probed are artillery, infantry, and armored-cavalry soldiers; military intelligence; the Air Force; counter-terrorism officers of the NYPD, NCIS, FBI, and CIA; and even the ultimate crime-fighting vigilante, Batman.
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.
The vile and unholy shadow of Chaos falls across the Gothic sector at the onslaught of Warmaster Abaddon's infernal Black Crusade. Fighting a desperate rearguard action, the Imperial Battlefleet has no choice but to sacrifice dozens of worlds and millions of lives to buy precious time for their fleets to regroup. But what possible chance do they have when Abaddon's unholy forces have the power to kill men and murder entire planets?
Choice Outstanding Academic Title 2014 This book examines the connections between the growth of'terror fiction' - the genre now known as 'Gothic' - in the late eighteenthcentury, and the simultaneous appearance of the conceptual origins of'terrorism' as a category of political action. In the 1790s, Crawford argues, fourinter-connected bodies of writing arose in Britain: the historical mythology ofthe French Revolution, the political rhetoric of 'terrorism', the genre ofpolitical conspiracy theory, and the literary genre of Gothic fiction, known atthe time as 'terrorist novel writing'. All four bodies of writing drew heavilyupon one another, in order to articulate their shared sense of the radical andmonstrous otherness of the extremes of human evil, a sense which was quite newto the eighteenth century, but has remained central to the ways in which wehave thought and written about evil and violence ever since.
After 9/11, the world felt the "shock and awe" of the War on Terror. But that war also exploded inside novels, films, comics, and gaming. Danel Olson investigates why the paranormal, ghostly, and conspiratorial entered such media between 2002-2022, and how this Gothic presence connects to the most recent theories on PTSD. Set in New York/Gotham, Afghanistan, Iraq, and CIA black sites, the traumatic and weird works interrogated here ask how killing affects the killers. The protagonists probed are artillery, infantry, and armored-cavalry soldiers; military intelligence; the Air Force; counter-terrorism officers of the NYPD, NCIS, FBI, and CIA; and even the ultimate crime-fighting vigilante, Batman.
breadth of range attention to the psychological meanings of various forms of the Gothic inclusion of material on some of the best-known Gothic texts, including Frankenstein and Dracula.
Procopius of Caesarea was born in approximately 500. He is generally considered to be the last major historian of the ancient world. His works have given us a unique and intimate account both of the Roman Military and its Emperor Justinian. A native of Caesarea in Palaestina Prima little else is known of his early life, and apart from assuming that he would have received a classical Greek Education the rest is deduction rather than based on known facts. In 527, the first year of Eastern Roman Emperor Justinian I's reign, he became the adsessor (legal adviser) for Belisarius, Justinian's chief military commander who was then starting out on what would become a brilliant military career, initially in the East of the Empire. After early successes Belisarius was defeated in 531 at the Battle of Callinicum and recalled to the Empire's heart in Constantinople. Justinian was without doubt clever but cruel. When part of Constantinople rose against him in the Nika riots of January, 532, he sent Belisarius and his fellow general Mundo to repress them in a savage massacre in the Hippodrome - witnessed by Procopius. The following year Procopius accompanied Belisarius on his victorious expedition against the Vandal kingdom in North Africa and took part in the capture of Carthage. Procopius remained in Northern Africa with Belisarius' successor, Solomon the Eunuch, when Belisarius returned to Constantinople. Procopius rejoined Belisarius for his campaign against the Ostrogothic kingdom in Italy and was there for the Gothic siege of Rome that lasted a year and nine days and ended in March, 538. He witnessed Belisarius' entry into the Gothic capital, Ravenna, in 540. However at some point in the next few years Procopius seems to have been moved away from working with Belisarius. When the latter was sent back to Italy in 544 to cope with a further outbreak of the war with the Goths, Procopius appears to have no longer been with Belisarius' staff. Procopius continued to record history and his works are both insightful and clear headed, distilling the complexities of the times into several classic books. His death is thought to have been around 560.
The imagination of the early twenty-first century is catastrophic, with Hollywood blockbusters, novels, computer games, popular music, art and even political speeches all depicting a world consumed by vampires, zombies, meteors, aliens from outer space, disease, crazed terrorists and mad scientists. These frequently gothic descriptions of the apocalypse not only commodify fear itself; they articulate and even help produce imperialism. Building on, and often retelling, the British ’imperial gothic’ of the late nineteenth century, the American imperial gothic is obsessed with race, gender, degeneration and invasion, with the destruction of society, the collapse of modernity and the disintegration of capitalism. Drawing on a rich array of texts from a long history of the gothic, this book contends that the doom faced by the world in popular culture is related to the current global instability, renegotiation of worldwide power and the American bid for hegemony that goes back to the beginning of the Republic and which have given shape to the first decade of the millennium. From the frontier gothic of Charles Brockden Brown's Edgar Huntly to the apocalyptic torture porn of Eli Roth's Hostel, the American imperial gothic dramatises the desires and anxieties of empire. Revealing the ways in which images of destruction and social upheaval both query the violence with which the US has asserted itself locally and globally, and feed the longing for stable imperial structures, this book will be of interest to scholars and students of popular culture, cultural and media studies, literary and visual studies and sociology.
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.
