Description
Book SynopsisFrom Horace Walpole to Angela Carter and the X-Files, new and familiar texts are reassessed, and common readings of Gothic themes and critical approaches to the genre are interrogated.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 onto 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, reexamine 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 genreare 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. Professor FRED BOTTING teaches in the Department of English at Keele University. Contributors: DAVID PUNTER, ELISABETH BRONFEN, E.J. CLERY, ROBERT MILES, JEAN-JACQUES LECERCLE, LESLIE J. MORAN, HELEN STODDART, FRED BOTTING, JERROLD E. HOGLE.
Table of ContentsPreface - the Gothic, 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 and 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.
