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.

Reading the Racial Encounter engages constructions of race through the analysis of scenes of meeting or encounter in three multimedia texts. Such scenes are rarely, if ever, subject to book-length analysis, yet such a project can arguably allow race to be understood in new and challenging ways. This book’s focus is on three texts that offer particularly nuanced and reflexive engagements with race representation: a video essay exploring Gypsy aesthetics by artists Daniel Baker and Paul Ryan; Boots Riley’s television series I’m a Virgo; and Jean Baudrillard’s controversial travelogue America. Taking an approach to these three texts that is rooted in extended, reflexive and especially fine-grained analysis, and an interest in questions of perspective and framing, the book analyses how their complexities might be further worked through, whilst exploring also some of the difficulties in so doing.This work will be of particular interest to scholars and advanced students of race theory, literary studies, media studies, and cultural analysis who seek fresh methodological approaches to understanding how race is constructed, performed, and contested across different media landscapes.

Questioning Ayn Rand: Subjectivity, Political Economy, and the Arts offers a sustained academic critique of Ayn Rand’s works and her wider Objectivist philosophy.

Questioning Ayn Rand: Subjectivity, Political Economy, and the Arts offers a sustained academic critique of Ayn Rand’s works and her wider Objectivist philosophy.

This book presents a critique of neoliberalism within UK Higher Education, taking its cue from approaches more usually associated with literary studies. It offers a sustained and detailed close reading of three works that might be understood to fall outside the established body of educational theory.