The first full-length study of incest in the Gothic genre, this book argues that Gothic writers resisted the power structures of their society through incestuous desires. It provides ...interdisciplinary readings of incest within father-daughter, sibling, mother-son, cousin and uncle-niece relationships in texts by authors including Emily Brontë, Eliza Parsons, Ann Radcliffe and Eleanor Sleath. The analyses, underpinned by historical, literary and cultural contexts, reveal that the incest thematic allowed writers to explore a range of related sexual, social and legal concerns. Through representations of incest, Gothic writers modelled alternative agencies, sexualities and family structures that remain relevant today.
This volume in this exciting new series provides a detailed yet accessible study of Gothic literature in the nineteenth century. It examines how themes and trends associated with the early Gothic ...novels were diffused widely in many different genres in the Victorian period, including the ghost story, the detective story and the adventure story.
Now available in paperback, Decadent daughters and monstrous mothers interrogates the vexed question of Angela Carter’s feminist politics through the dusty lens of European Gothic. It illuminates her ...ambivalent relation to some of her most contentious European literary forebears, reveals her rich knowledge of French literature and offers fresh insights into her literary practices afforded by newly available archival material. This book analyses Carter’s textual engagements with a dirty lineage of European Gothic that can be mapped from the Marquis de Sade’s obsession with desecration and defilement, through Baudelaire’s perverse decompositions of the muse and decadent imaginings of infernal femininity, to surrealism’s violent dreams of abjection. It argues that Carter’s most troublesome engagements with her European Gothic forefathers are unexpectedly those which are most vital to a consideration of her feminist politics.
This collection of essays redefines what gothic has become in the contemporary world, examining the idea of an emerging gothic that is inextricable from the broader global context in which it ...circulates. Globalgothic expands the horizons of the genre in diverse new and exciting ways.
The Gothic has taken a revolutionary turn in this century. Today’s Gothic has fashioned its monsters and devils into heroes and angels and is actively reviving supernaturalism in popular culture. ...Nelson argues that this mainstreaming of a spiritually driven supernaturalism is a harbinger of what a post-Christian religion in America might look like.
The first book-length study to address Moore's significance to the Gothic, this volume is also the first to provide in-depth analyses of his spoken-word performances, poetry and prose, as well as his ...comics and graphic novels.
Selected by a poll of more than 180 Gothic specialists (creative writers, professors, critics, and Gothic Studies program developers at universities), the fifty-three original works discussed in ...21st-Century Gothic represent the most impressive Gothic novels written around the world between 2000-2010. The essays in this volume discuss the merits of these novels, highlighting the influences and key components that make them worthy of inclusion. Many of the pioneer voices of Gothic Studies, as well as other key critics of the field, have all contributed new essays to this volume, including David Punter, Jerrold Hogle, Karen F. Stein, Marie Mulvey-Roberts, Mary Ellen Snodgrass, Tony Magistrale, Don D'Ammassa, Mavis Haut, Walter Rankin, James Doig, Laurence A. Rickels, Douglass H. Thomson, Sue Zlosnik, Carol Margaret Davision, Ruth Bienstock Anolik, Glennis Byron, Judith Wilt, Bernice Murphy, Darrell Schweitzer, and June Pulliam. The guide includes a preface by one of the world's leading authorities on the weird and fantastic, S. T. Joshi. Sharing their knowledge of how traditional Gothic elements and tensions surface in a changed way within a contemporary novel, the contributors enhance the reader's dark enjoyment, emotional involvement, and appreciation of these works. These essays show not only how each of these novels are Gothic but also how they advance or change Gothicism, making the works both irresistible for readers and establishing their place in the Gothic canon.
Deep into the Labyrinths in the Novels by Louise Welsh is the first book to focus on the novels of Louise Welsh, one of the most acclaimed and interesting narrative voices in contemporary Scottish ...Literature. It explores the use of the image of the labyrinth as one of the sites for horror in classic Gothic literature and its rewriting into a contemporary gothic labyrinth in 21st century Scotland - and, by extension, in the European context - that co-exists with various other queer and intertextual labyrinths that complement and complicate it. This book analyses how Louise Welsh's novels present different labyrinths that characters traverse and get lost in, and, by the same process, with which readers also become engaged. In both cases, characters and readers discover that the labyrinthine understanding of reality becomes more real than any other official version of reality. Each chapter of the book explores particular examples of these labyrinths, even though they are not linear: they tend to intermingle and intertwine.
The Haunted States of America: Gothic Regionalism in Post-war American fiction focuses on existing regional Gothic strains to examine how the anxieties, fears and concerns illustrated in the works of ...several post-World War II writers can be best understood through regional history and identity.
In describing his proto-Gothic fiction, The Castle of Otranto (1764), as a translation, Horace Walpole was deliberately playing on national anxieties concerning the importation of war, fashion and ...literature from France in the aftermath of the Seven Years' War. In the last decade of the eighteenth century, as Britain went to war again with France, this time in the wake of revolution, the continuing connections between Gothic literature and France through the realms of translation, adaptation and unacknowledged borrowing led to strong suspicions of Gothic literature taking on a subversive role in diminishing British patriotism. Angela Wright explores the development of Gothic literature in Britain in the context of the fraught relationship between Britain and France, offering fresh perspectives on the works of Walpole, Radcliffe, 'Monk' Lewis and their contemporaries.
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