Description
Book SynopsisThis book brings together fourteen of the most ambitious and thought-provoking recent essays by David Punter, who has been writing on the Gothic to academic and general acclaim for over thirty years. Punter addresses developments in Gothic writing and Gothic criticism since the mid-eighteenth century, by isolating and discussing specific themes and scenarios that have remained relevant to literary and philosophical discussion over the decades and centuries, and also by paying close attention to the motifs, figures and recurrences that loom so large in twenty-first-century engagements with the Gothic. This book, while engaging deeply with Gothic history, constantly addresses our continuing immediate encounters with Gothic tropes – the vampire, the zombie, the phantom, the living dead.
Table of ContentsPhantoms of Theory 1) Spectrality: The Ghosting of Theory Fables of History 2) Francis Lathom in the Eighteenth Century 3) Types of Tyranny Sciences of the Strange 4) Pseudo-Science and the Creation of Monsters 5) Technogenealogies: Family Secrets 6) The Abhuman Remains of the Gothic 7) ‘A Foot is What fits the Shoe’: Gothic, Disability and Prosthesis Some Humans, Some Monstrosities 8) M.R. James: Terror and History 9) Dark and Light Rays: The Penetration of the Body 10) Of Monsters and Animals Global, Local, War 11) Cyborgs, Borders and Stories for Virgins: Mexico and the Gothic 12) Heart Lands: Contemporary Scottish Gothic Last Things 13) Grievous Bodily Harm 14) Thoughts on Teaching Psychoanalysis and the Gothic
