21st Century British Gothic

In this innovative re-casting of the genre and its received canon, Emily Horton explores fictional investments in the Gothic within contemporary British literature, revealing how such concepts as the monstrous, spectral and uncanny work to illuminate the insecure, uneven and precarious experience of 21st-century life. Reading contemporary works of Gothic fiction by Helen Oyeyemi, Kazuo Ishiguro, Sarah Moss, Patrick McGrath and M.R. Carey alongside writers not previously grouped under this umbrella, including Brian Chikwava, Chloe Aridjis and Mohsin Hamid, Horton illuminates the way the Gothic has been engaged and reread by contemporary writers to address the cultural anxieties invoked living under neocolonial and neoliberal governance, including terrorism, migration, homelessness, racism, and climate change. Marshalling new modes of diasporic and cross-disciplinary critical theory concerned with the violent dimensions of contemporary life, this book sets the Gothic aesthetics in such works as White is for Witching, Double Vision, Never Let Me Go, The Wasted Vigil and Ghost Wall against a backdrop of key events in the 21st-century. Drawing connections between moments of anxiety, such as 9/11, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, ecological disaster, the refugee crisis, Brexit, the pandemic, and the Gothic, Horton demonstrates how British literature mediates transnational experiences of trauma and horror, while also addressing local and national insecurities and preoccupations. As a result, 21st-Century British Gothic can tests geographical, psychological, cultural, and aesthetic borders to expose an often spectralised experience of human and planetary vulnerability and speaks back against the brutality of global capitalism.

This resource in contemporary Gothic literature, film and television takes a thematic approach, providing insights into the many forms the Gothic has taken in the twenty-first century.

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.

The most extensive and up-to-date volume of essays on the Gothic mode in twentieth century culture. During the latter half of the twentieth century the Gothic emerged as one of the liveliest and most significant areas of academic inquiry within literary, film, and popular culture studies. This volume covers the key concepts and developments associated with Twentieth-Century Gothic, tracing the development of the mode from the fin de siècle to 9/11. The eighteen chapters reflect the interdisciplinary and ever-evolving nature of the Gothic, which, during the century, migrated from literature and drama to the cinema and television. The volume has both a chronological and thematic focus and particular attention is paid to topics and themes related to race, identity, marginality and technology. Chapters on ecogothic, Gothic Studies as a discipline, Medical Humanities, Queer Studies, African American Studies and Russian Gothic ensure that the collection is up-to-date and wide-ranging. Suggested further readings at the end of each chapter are intended to facilitate further independent research by readers and researchers. Sorcha Ní Fhlainn is Senior Lecturer in Film Studies and American Studies, and a founding member of the Manchester Centre for Gothic Studies, in the Department of English at Manchester Metropolitan University. Her recent books include Clive Barker: Dark Imaginer (2017) and Postmodern Vampires: Film, Fiction, and Popular Culture (2019). Bernice M. Murphy is an Associate Professor and Lecturer in Popular Literature at the School of English, Trinity College, Dublin. She has published extensively on topics related to Gothic and horror fiction and film. Her latest monograph is entitled The California Gothic in Fiction and Film.

The literature of terror and horror continues to fascinate readers both casual and more critical, and it has long been recognised as an international, not merely British, phenomenon. This study provides an in-depth and text-based analysis of Gothic fiction in France and Germany from earlier literary traditions, through the influence of the English Gothic novel, to an extraordinary popularity and dominance by the end of the eighteenth century. It examines how some of the motifs most closely associated with the Gothic - secret societies, the supernatural and suspense, among others - are the product of an uncertain age, and how the use of those motifs differed not just across languages and borders, which in fact the Gothic often crossed with ease, but according to the views, concerns and sometimes insecurities of individual authors. What emerges is a complex genre more diverse than any 'list of Gothic ingredients' would have us believe. Many of the notions and devices explored by the French and German Gothic then continue to intrigue, disturb and unsettle today.

This handbook provides a comprehensive overview of research on the Gothic Revival. The Gothic Revival was based on emotion rather than reason and when Horace Walpole created Strawberry Hill House, a gleaming white castle on the banks of the Thames, he had to create new words to describe the experience of gothic lifestyle. Nevertheless, Walpole’s house produced nightmares and his book The Castle of Otranto was the first truly gothic novel, with supernatural, sensational and Shakespearean elements challenging the emergent fiction of social relationships. The novel’s themes of violence, tragedy, death, imprisonment, castle battlements, dungeons, fair maidens, secrets, ghosts and prophecies led to a new genre encompassing prose, theatre, poetry and painting, whilst opening up a whole world of imagination for entrepreneurial female writers such as Mary Shelley, Joanna Baillie and Ann Radcliffe, whose immensely popular books led to the intense inner landscapes of the Bronte sisters. Matthew Lewis’s The Monk created a new gothic: atheistic, decadent, perverse, necrophilic and hellish. The social upheaval of the French Revolution and the emergence of the Romantic movement with its more intense (and often) atheistic self-absorption led the gothic into darker corners of human experience with a greater emphasis on the inner life, hallucination, delusion, drug addiction, mental instability, perversion and death and the emerging science of psychology. The intensity of the German experience led to an emphasis on doubles and schizophrenic behaviour, ghosts, spirits, mesmerism, the occult and hell. This volume charts the origins of this major shift in social perceptions and completes a trilogy of Palgrave Handbooks on the Gothic—combined they provide an exhaustive survey of current research in Gothic studies, a go-to for students and researchers alike.

A transnational and transmedia companion to the post-millennial GothicKey FeaturesCovers key areas and themes of the post-millennial Gothic as well as developments in the field and revisions of the Gothic traditionConsitutes the first thematic compendium to this area with a transmedia (literature, film and television) and transnational approachCovers a plurality of texts, from novels such as Stephenie Meyer's Twilight (2005), Helen Oyeyemi's White Is for Witching (2009), Justin Cronin's The Passage (2010) and M.R. Carey's The Girl with All the Gifts (2014), to films such as Kairo (2001), Juan of the Dead (2012) and The Darkside (2013), to series such as Dante's Cove (2005-7), Hemlock Grove (2013-15), Penny Dreadful (2014-16) Black Mirror (2011-) and even the Slenderman mythos.This resource in contemporary Gothic literature, film and television takes a thematic approach, providing insights into the many forms the Gothic has taken in the twenty-first century. The 20 newly commissioned chapters cover emerging and expanding research areas, such as digital technologies, queer identity, the New Weird and postfeminism. They also discuss contemporary Gothic monsters - including zombies, vampires and werewolves - and highlight Ethnogothic forms such as Asian and Black Diasporic Gothic.