Edited by Fred Botting, Keele University
ISBN: 0859916197 First published November 2001 £30.00 / US$60.0
The popularity of Gothic fictions, themes and films suggests that the genre is the norm as much as the dark underside of contemporary cultural production. Having endured for over two hundred years and settled into numerous respectable courses of study, the meaning and value of the Gothic seems due for reappraisal.
The essays in this volume, written by critics whose work over the last twenty years has considerably advanced the understanding of the Gothic genre, re-examine its literary, historical and cultural significance: from Horace Walpole to Angela Carter and the X-Files, new and familiar texts are reassessed; common readings of Gothic themes and critical approaches to the genre are interrogated; Gothic finds itself integrally involved in the production of a modern sense of the nation; it continues to haunt legal discourses; it underpins social mythologies and ideologies; informs histories of sexuality and identity; offers curious substance to notions of community and culture and raises questions of ethics and postmodernism.
Contents
Introduction, Fred Botting
Gothic Violence, Trauma and the Ethical, David Punter and Elisabeth Bronfen
Horace Walpole’s Mysterious Mother and the Impossibility of Female Desire, E.J. Clery
Abjection, Nationalism and the Gothic, Robert Miles
The Kitten’s Nose: Dracula and Witchcraft, Jean-Jacques Lecercle
Law and the Gothic Imagination, Leslie J. Moran
The Passion of New Eve and the Cinema: Hysteria, Spectacle, Masquerade, Helen Stoddart
Candygothic, Fred Botting
The Gothic at Our Turn of the Century: Our Culture of Simulation and the Return of the Body, Jerrold E. Hogle
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