Twentieth-Century Gothic

Sorcha Ní Fhlainn is Senior Lecturer in Film Studies and American Studies and founding member of the Manchester Centre for Gothic Studies at Manchester Metropolitan University. She is the author of Postmodern Vampires: Film, Fiction, and Popular Culture (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019) which was awarded the Lord Ruthven Prize in 2020 and the editor of Clive Barker: Dark Imaginer (Manchester University Press, 2017) The Worlds of Back to the Future: Critical essays on the films (Macfarland, 2010) and Our Monstrous (S)kin: Blurring the Boundaries Between Monsters and Humanity (The Inter-Disciplinary Press, 2010). Bernice M. Murphy is an Associate Professor and Lecturer in Popular Literature in the School of English, Trinity College, Dublin. She has published extensively on topics related to American Gothic and horror fiction and film and was recently academic consultant to The Letters of Shirley Jackson (2021, edited by Laurence Jackson Hyman). Bernice was made a Fellow of Trinity College Dublin in 2017.

A survey of a field as broad as Gothic in the twentieth century might seem impossible, but this book fulfils the task admirably. Ranging across fiction, film, theatre and technological media and picking up themes as various as war, surveillance, ethnicity and medicine, these essays are essential and elegant contributions to the study of the Gothic.

• Introduction: ‘Going to Extremes: The Gothic in the Twentieth-Century’ – Bernice M. Murphy and Sorcha Ní FhlainnPart 1: Gothic Evolutions:1. ‘The Edwardian Supernatural’ – Emma Liggins 2. ‘Weird Fiction in the Twentieth-Century Gothic’ – Kevin Corstorphine 3. ‘Gothic Modernism’ – Matt Foley 4. ‘Gothic Criticism in the Twentieth-Century: Who is This That is Coming? – Scott Brewster Part 2: The Gothic and Technology/Transmedia Considerations5. ‘The Birth of an Evil Thought: The Gothic in Silent-Era Cinema’ – Murray Leeder 6. ‘Grand-Guignol as Twentieth-Century Gothic Drama’ – Madelon Hoedt 7. ‘Mid-Century Gothic Cinema (1931-79): From Monster Business to Exploitation’ Horror – Xavier Aldana Reyes 8. "The Unheimlich State: Surveillance and the Digital Nation’ – Julia Wright 9. Gothic Horror Films at the Fin-de-Millennium: From Nightmare Videos to Filtered Realities (1980 – 2000) - Sorcha Ní FhlainnPart 3: Key Themes and Topics in Twentieth-Century Gothic:10. ‘Twentieth-Century War Gothic’ – Agnieszka Slotysik Monnet 11. ‘Russian Twentieth-Century Gothic: The Irrepressible Undead’ – Muireann Maguire 12. ‘The Gothic Nineteen-Fifties’ – Steffen Hantke 13. ‘Masks of Sanity: The Rise of the Psychopath in Twentieth-Century Gothic’ - Bernice M. Murphy 14. ‘Troubling Legacies: African American Women’s Gothic from Zora Neale Hurston to Tananarive Due’ – Dara Downey 15. ‘Medical Humanities and the Gothic’ – Laura R. Kremmel 16. ‘Queer Gothic Literature and Culture’ – Laura Westengard 17. ‘Nightmares of the Normative’: African American Gothic and the Rejection of the American Ideal’ – Maisha Wester 18. ‘Big Bad Wolves and Angry Sharks: The Ecogothic and a Century of Environmental Change’– Christy Tidwell About the ContributorsIndex