This volume carves out a new area of study, the 'industrial
Gothic', placing the genre in dialogue with the literature of the
Industrial Revolution. The book explores a significant subset of
...transatlantic nineteenth-century literature that employs the
tropes, themes and rhetoric of the Gothic to portray the real-life
horrors of factory life, framing the Industrial Revolution as a
site of Gothic excess and horror. Using archival materials from the
nineteenth century, localised incidences of Gothic
industrialisation (in specific cities like Lowell and Manchester)
are considered alongside transnational connections and comparisons.
The author argues that stories about the real horrors of factory
life frequently employed the mode of the Gothic, while nineteenth
century writing in the genre (stories, novels, poems and stage
adaptations) began to use new settings - factories, mills, and
industrial cities - as backdrops for the horrors that once
populated Gothic castles.
This collection examines Gothic fiction written by female authors in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Analysing works by lesser known authors within a historical context, the ...collection offers a fresh perspective on women writers and their contributions to Gothic literature.
Haunted Empire shows that Gothic elements in Russian literature frequently expressed deep-set anxieties about the Russian imperial and national identity. Valeria Sobol argues that the persistent ...presence of Gothic tropes in the literature of the Russian Empire is a key literary form that enacts deep historical and cultural tensions arising from Russia's idiosyncratic imperial experience. Her book brings together theories of empire and colonialism with close readings of canonical and less-studied literary texts as she explores how Gothic horror arises from the threatening ambiguity of Russia's own past and present, producing the effect Sobol terms "the imperial uncanny." Focusing on two spaces of the imperial uncanny—the Baltic north/Finland and the Ukrainian south— Haunted Empire reconstructs a powerful discursive tradition that reveals the mechanisms of the Russian imperial imagination that are still at work today.
This collection examines young adult Gothic fiction to demonstrate how the contemporary resurgence of the Gothic in texts for young people signals anxieties about, and hopes for, young people in the ...twenty-first century.
Through an investigation of the body and its oppression by the church, the medical profession and the state, this book reveals the actual horrors lying beneath fictional horror in settings as diverse ...as the monastic community, slave plantation, operating theatre, Jewish ghetto and battlefield trench. The book provides original readings of canonical Gothic literary and film texts including The Castle of Otranto, The Monk, Frankenstein, Dracula and Nosferatu. This collection of fictionalised dangerous bodies is traced back to the effects of the English Reformation, Spanish Inquisition, French Revolution, Caribbean slavery, Victorian medical malpractice, European anti-Semitism and finally warfare, ranging from the Crimean up to the Vietnam War. The endangered or dangerous body lies at the centre of the clash between victim and persecutor and has generated tales of terror and narratives of horror, which function to either salve, purge or dangerously perpetuate such oppositions. This ground-breaking book will be of interest to academics and students of Gothic studies, gender and film studies and especially to readers interested in the relationship between history and literature.
Romantic Gothic: An Edinburgh Companion offers a rigorous account of the Gothic impulses informing British, American and European literary culture of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth ...centuries.
Gothic Metaphysics is a radical departure from Freudian-centred criticism of Gothic literature. It aims to explore our modern dilemma in the time of the Anthropocene, by bringing to light the role of ...Gothic since its inception in 1764 in holding space for a worldview familiar to certain mystical traditions – such as alchemy, which held to the view of a living cosmos yet later deemed 'uncanny' and anachronistic by Freud. In developing this idea, Gothic Metaphysics explores the influence of the Middle Ages on the emergence of Gothic, seeing it as an encrypted genre that serves as the site of a 'live burial' of 'animism', which has emerged in the notion of 'quantum entanglement' best described by Carl G. Jung and physicist Wolfgang Pauli in the theory of synchronicity linking alchemy with quantum mechanics. This relationship finds itself in dialogue with the Gothic's long-held concern for the 'sentience of space and place', as described by renowned Gothic scholar Fredrick Frank. The volume Gothic Metaphysics is multi-valent and explores how Gothic has sustained the view of a sentient world despite the disqualification of nature – not only in respect to the extirpation of animism as a worldview, but also with regard to an affirmation of consciousness beyond that of human exceptionalism.
Since the 1990s, the virus and the network metaphors have become increasingly popular, finding application in a broad range of everyday discourses, academic disciplines, and fiction genres. In this ...book, Rahel Sixta Schmitz defines and discusses a trope recurring in Gothic fiction: the supernatural media virus. This trope comprises the confluence of the virus, the network, and a deep, underlying media anxiety. This study shows how Gothic narratives such as House of Leaves or The Ring feature the supernatural media virus to negotiate as well as actively shape imaginations of the network society and the dangers of a globalized, technologized world.
