International Gothic Series – serie

‘The dead travel fast and, in our contemporary globalised world, so too does the gothic.’ Examining how gothic has been globalised and globalisation made gothic, this collection of essays explores an emerging globalgothic that is simultaneously a continuation of the western tradition and a wholesale transformation of that tradition which expands the horizons of the gothic in diverse new and exciting ways.Globalgothic contains essays from some of the leading scholars in gothic studies as well as offering insights from new scholars in the field. The contributors consider a wide range of different media, including literary texts, film, dance, music, cyberculture, computer games, and graphic novels. This book will be essential reading for all students and academics interested in the gothic, in international literature, cinema, and cyberspace.

Monstrous media/spectral subjects explores the intersection of monsters, ghosts, representation and technology in Gothic texts from the nineteenth century to the present. It argues that emerging media technologies from the phantasmagoria and magic lantern to the hand-held video camera and the personal computer both shape Gothic subjects and in turn become Gothicised. In a collection of essays that ranges from the Victorian fiction of Wilkie Collins, Bram Stoker and Richard Marsh to the music of Tom Waits, world horror cinema and the TV series Doctor Who, this book finds fresh and innovative contexts for the study of Gothic. Combining essays by well-established and emerging scholars, it should appeal to academics and students researching both Gothic literature and culture and the cultural impact of new technologies.

This book will provide the first study of how the Gothic engages with ecocritical ideas. Ecocriticism has frequently explored images of environmental catastrophe, the wilderness, the idea of home, constructions of 'nature', and images of the post-apocalypse – images which are also central to a certain type of Gothic literature. By exploring the relationship between the ecocritical aspects of the Gothic and the Gothic elements of the ecocritical, this book provides a new way of looking at both the Gothic and ecocriticism. Writers discussed include Ann Radcliffe, Mary Shelley, Ambrose Bierce, Algernon Blackwood, Margaret Atwood, Cormac McCarthy, Dan Simmons and Rana Dasgupta. The volume thus explores writing and film across various national contexts including Britain, America and Canada, as well as giving due consideration to how such issues might be discussed within a global context.

‘The dead travel fast and, in our contemporary globalised world, so too does the gothic.’ Examining how gothic has been globalised and globalisation made gothic, this collection of essays explores an emerging globalgothic that is simultaneously a continuation of the western tradition and a wholesale transformation of that tradition which expands the horizons of the gothic in diverse new and exciting ways.Globalgothic contains essays from some of the leading scholars in gothic studies as well as offering insights from new scholars in the field. The contributors consider a wide range of different media, including literary texts, film, dance, music, cyberculture, computer games, and graphic novels. This book will be essential reading for all students and academics interested in the gothic, in international literature, cinema, and cyberspace.

The explosion of interest in the gothic in recent years has coincided with a number of seismic political changes that have reshaped the world as we know it. Neoliberal Gothic explores that world, considering the ways in which the exponential increase in the cultural visibility of the gothic attests to the mode's engagement with the most significant dynamics of our age. These include the triumph of free market economics, the revolution in information and communication technologies, the emergence of global biotechnologies, the increasing power of transnational corporations, the US-led 'War on Terror' and the global financial crisis of 2008.Through analysis of texts drawn from literature, film, television, theatre and the visual arts (from the Europe to South East Asia, Africa to North and South America) the collection examines the ways in which the representational strategies of the gothic mode are ideally suited to an exploration of the dark side of neoliberal enterprise.

Suicide and the Gothic is the first protracted study of how the act of self-destruction recurs and functions within one of the most enduring and popular forms of fiction. Comprising eleven original essays and an authoritative introduction, this collection explores how the act of suicide has been portrayed, interrogated and pathologised from the eighteenth century to the present. The featured fictions embrace both canonical and the less-studied texts and examine the crisis of suicide – a crisis that has personal, familial, religious, legal and medical implications – in European, American and Asian contexts. Featuring detailed interventions into the understanding of texts as temporally distant as Thomas Percy’s Reliques and Patricia Highsmith’s crime fictions, and movements as diverse as Wertherism, Romanticism and fin-de-siècle decadence, Suicide and the Gothic provides a comprehensive and compelling overview of this recurrent crisis in fiction and culture.

Monstrous media/spectral subjects explores the intersection of monsters, ghosts, representation and technology in Gothic texts from the nineteenth century to the present. It argues that emerging media technologies from the phantasmagoria and magic lantern to the hand-held video camera and the personal computer both shape Gothic subjects and in turn become Gothicised. In a collection of essays that ranges from the Victorian fiction of Wilkie Collins, Bram Stoker and Richard Marsh to the music of Tom Waits, world horror cinema and the TV series Doctor Who, this book finds fresh and innovative contexts for the study of Gothic. Combining essays by well-established and emerging scholars, it should appeal to academics and students researching both Gothic literature and culture and the cultural impact of new technologies.

Nordic Gothic traces Gothic fiction in the Nordic region from its beginnings in the nineteenth century, with a main focus on the development of Gothic from the 1990s onwards in literature, film, TV and new media. The volume gives an overview of Nordic Gothic fiction in relation to transnational developments and provides a number of case studies and in-depth analyses of individual narratives. It creates an understanding of this under-researched cultural phenomenon by showing how the narratives make visible cultural anxieties haunting the Nordic countries, their welfare systems, identities and ideologies. Nordic Gothic examines how figures from Nordic folklore function as metaphorical expressions of Gothic themes and Nordic settings are explored from perspectives such as ecocriticism and postcolonialism. The book will be of interest to researchers and post- and- undergraduate students in various fields within the Humanities.

The explosion of interest in the gothic in recent years has coincided with a number of seismic political changes that have reshaped the world as we know it. Neoliberal Gothic explores that world, considering the ways in which the exponential increase in the cultural visibility of the gothic attests to the mode's engagement with the most significant dynamics of our age. These include the triumph of free market economics, the revolution in information and communication technologies, the emergence of global biotechnologies, the increasing power of transnational corporations, the US-led 'War on Terror' and the global financial crisis of 2008.Through analysis of texts drawn from literature, film, television, theatre and the visual arts (from Europe to South East Asia, Africa to North and South America) the collection examines the ways in which the representational strategies of the gothic mode are ideally suited to an exploration of the dark side of neoliberal enterprise.

The Gothic and death offers the first ever published study devoted to the subject of the Gothic and death across the centuries. It investigates how the multifarious strands of the Gothic and the concepts of death, dying, mourning and memorialisation ('the Death Question') - have intersected and been configured cross-culturally to diverse ends from the mid-eighteenth century to the present day. Drawing on recent scholarship in such fields as Gothic Studies, film theory, Women's and Gender Studies and Thanatology Studies, this interdisciplinary collection of fifteen essays by international scholars combines an attention to socio-historical and cultural contexts with a rigorous close reading of works, both classic and lesser known. This area of enquiry is considered by way of such popular and uncanny figures as corpses, ghosts, zombies and vampires, and across various cultural and literary forms such as Graveyard Poetry, Romantic poetry, Victorian literature, nineteenth-century Italian and Russian literature, Anglo-American film and television, contemporary Young Adult fiction and Bollywood film noir.

Nordic Gothic traces Gothic fiction in the Nordic region from its beginnings in the nineteenth century, with a main focus on the development of Gothic from the 1990s onwards in literature, film, TV and new media. The volume gives an overview of Nordic Gothic fiction in relation to transnational developments and provides a number of case studies and in-depth analyses of individual narratives. It creates an understanding of this under-researched cultural phenomenon by showing how the narratives make visible cultural anxieties haunting the Nordic countries, their welfare systems, identities and ideologies. Nordic Gothic examines how figures from Nordic folklore function as metaphorical expressions of Gothic themes and Nordic settings are explored from perspectives such as ecocriticism and postcolonialism. The book will be of interest to researchers and post- and- undergraduate students in various fields within the Humanities.

Suicide and the Gothic is the first protracted study of how the act of self-destruction recurs and functions within one of the most enduring and popular forms of fiction. Comprising eleven original essays and an authoritative introduction, this collection explores how the act of suicide has been portrayed, interrogated and pathologised from the eighteenth century to the present. The featured fictions embrace both canonical and the less-studied texts and examine the crisis of suicide – a crisis that has personal, familial, religious, legal and medical implications – in European, American and Asian contexts. Featuring detailed interventions into the understanding of texts as temporally distant as Thomas Percy’s Reliques and Patricia Highsmith’s crime fictions, and movements as diverse as Wertherism, Romanticism and fin-de-siècle decadence, Suicide and the Gothic provides a comprehensive and compelling overview of this recurrent crisis in fiction and culture.

Ghosts have long been connected with the Gothic, but until now there has not been a book dedicated to the subject. This collection examines ghostly presences (and absences) in both classic and lesser-known Gothic texts from the beginning of the genre to the present in a global context. Arguing that the undead, in the form of ghosts, are intrinsic to the Gothic mode, essays in the collection question the place of manifested spirits. The Gothic has always been ‘political’, and essays in this collection examine some of the most relevant issues facing us today: from the destruction of the natural environment, to questions of ‘freedom’, to gender politics.

Russo-Soviet Imperialist Hauntings explores the ghosts of colonial and totalitarian pasts that have resurfaced across international political and cultural landscapes since the collapse of the USSR. Merging postcolonial, post-totalitarian, postcommunist and Gothic frameworks, the volume examines largely overlooked dimensions of cultural decolonisation, focusing on the unsettling “hauntings” of unresolved memory traces of Russo-Soviet domination in former Eastern Bloc countries and Soviet republics. Working within a wide intertextual field of social, cultural and ideological discourses, it fosters productive exchange across disciplinary boundaries and brings together voices from Europe and North America. Contributors draw on transmedia approaches—literature, visual art, film—as well as transnational and translingual perspectives, illuminating the diverse forms the Gothic has taken in the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries and its persistent engagement with history, ideology and politics.

The Gothic in times of crisis reflects contemporary society, showing how the Gothic modes continually resets its own forms to encompass each new reality, each new apocalypse, each new plague or crisis. This collection expands oncurrent scholarship to show how the Gothic challenges our understanding of both older and recent crises and, in turn, disturbs all genre complacencies to expose and confront the problems and contradictions in what our world has been, has become, or is in danger of becoming. This collection explores Gothic’s current relevance to the contestations of ideas and the underlying and visible conflicts it dramatizes across a wide range of media. In various ways, it reveals what happens to Gothic modes now they confront the increasingly Gothic realities of our times, sometimesby recalling earlier crises and ideological contestations leading up to them.