Description
Book SynopsisThis book covers Gothic writing and film from Henry James to Sarah Waters. Among its primary themes are the role of the ghost in relation to childhood and cultural mourning, the relationship between Gothic Architecture and the 'landscapes' of dream and nightmare and the interface between Gothic and Horror modes of writing.
Trade Review"The great strength of this excellent book is that it is not a straightforward tour through the canonical works of the twentieth-century Gothic. It is much more interesting than that. Armitt takes the reader on a devious, elliptical, fascinating journey through a range of strange texts, some well-known and others unjustifiably less so, combining critical inventiveness and precision with a constant undertow of reference to major cultural and social preoccupations--child abuse, trauma, aftermaths of war, sexual uncertainty and transgression--which both illumine the texts and are in turn illumined, through a specifically distorted Gothic lens, by them."--David Punter, University of Bristol
Table of ContentsIntroduction The Gothic Attraction and/of the Counterfeit Gothic Culture and the Marketplace Chapter One - Gothic Pathologies: Haunted Children Child Murder and the Media Storm Fairy Stories and 'Burial Alive': A.S. Byatt and Graham Joyce Photographing Fairies: Framing the Dead Death and the Dolls' House: FairyTale: A True Story and M.R. James Chapter Two - Building Suspense: Architectural Gothic Haunted Geometries I: Kipling, 'Swept and Garnished' Haunted Geometries II: Eco, The Name of the Rose Suburban and Rural Monstrosity: Clive Barker and Iain Banks London Gothic: Elizabeth Bowen and Sarah Waters Designer Bathtubs and Drowning in Air: What Lies Beneath Chapter Three - Gothic Inhumanity Bestiality and the Gothic: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Leonora Carrington Vampires and Bloodfests: Leonora Carrington and Clive Barker Monster Birds - Du Maurier and Hitchcock 'Daddy's Home!': Jekyll Chapter Four - Queering the Gothic Jolly Queer - Henry James The Apparitional Lesbian: Sarah Waters AIDS/HIV and the Gothicising of Male Homosexuality: Patrick McGrath Chapter Five - Survey of Criticism Chapter Six - Conclusion: Thriller and Stranger
