Neil Cocks – författare

In the Gothic, nothing stays buried for long. Since its inception in the mid-eighteenth century, the Gothic imagination has been concerned with the pasts of the societies from which it emerged. This collection, featuring contributions from archivists, historians and literary critics, examines how horror fiction and the wider Gothic mode have engaged with the constructed conception of "history".

From Victorian nightmares of Jurassic jungles to ghost stories on the contemporary stage, the contributors adopt varied and innovative approaches to consider how the Gothic has created, complicated and sometimes subverted historical narratives. In doing so, these works blur the distinctions between the "historical record" and creative endeavour, undermine linear and sequential understandings of the progress of time and dissolve temporal boundaries. The collection explores a variety of Gothic forms including drama, poetry, prose, illustration, film and folklore, and it draws on classic texts such as Wuthering Heights and Dracula, as well as less familiar works, including Reynolds’ The Mysteries of London and Baldini’s Mal’aria.

Literature, the Gothic and the Reconstruction of History will be invaluable to students and scholars interested in the confluences of literary and historical endeavour, the creation and depiction of historical constructs in popular culture, and Gothic horror in its myriad forms.

In the Gothic, nothing stays buried for long. Since its inception in the mid-eighteenth century, the Gothic imagination has been concerned with the pasts of the societies from which it emerged. This collection, featuring contributions from archivists, historians and literary critics, examines how horror fiction and the wider Gothic mode have engaged with the constructed conception of "history".

From Victorian nightmares of Jurassic jungles to ghost stories on the contemporary stage, the contributors adopt varied and innovative approaches to consider how the Gothic has created, complicated and sometimes subverted historical narratives. In doing so, these works blur the distinctions between the "historical record" and creative endeavour, undermine linear and sequential understandings of the progress of time and dissolve temporal boundaries. The collection explores a variety of Gothic forms including drama, poetry, prose, illustration, film and folklore, and it draws on classic texts such as Wuthering Heights and Dracula, as well as less familiar works, including Reynolds’ The Mysteries of London and Baldini’s Mal’aria.

Literature, the Gothic and the Reconstruction of History will be invaluable to students and scholars interested in the confluences of literary and historical endeavour, the creation and depiction of historical constructs in popular culture, and Gothic horror in its myriad forms.

Questioning Ayn Rand: Subjectivity, Political Economy, and the Arts offers a sustained academic critique of Ayn Rand’s works and her wider Objectivist philosophy. While Rand’s texts are often dismissed out of hand by those hostile to the ideology promoted within them, these essays argue instead that they need to be taken seriously and analysed in detail. Rand’s influential worldview does not tolerate uncertainty, relying as it does upon a notion of truth untroubled by doubt. In contrast, the contributors to this volume argue that any progressive response to Rand should resist the dubious comforts of a position of ethical or aesthetic purity, even as they challenge the reductive individualistic ideology promoted within her writing. Drawing on a range of sources and approaches from Psychoanalysis to The Gold Standard and from Hannah Arendt to Spiderman, these essays consider Rand’s works in the context of wider political, economic, and philosophical debates.