9 11 Gothic

Published to coincide with the twentieth anniversary of the World Trade Center attacks, 9/11 Gothic: Decrypting Ghosts and Trauma in New York City’s Terrorism Novels returns to the ruins and anguish of 9/11 to pose a question not yet addressed by scholarship. Two time World Fantasy Award-winning writer Danel Olson asks how, why, and where New York City novels capture the terror of the Al-Qaeda mass murders through a supernatural lens. This book explores ghostly presences from the world’s largest crime scene in novels by Don DeLillo, Jonathan Safran Foer, Lynne Sharon Schwartz, Griffin Hansbury, and Patrick McGrath—all of whom have been called writers of Gotham. Arguing how theories on trauma and the Gothic can combine to explain ghostly encounters civilian survivors experience in fiction, Olson shares what those eerie meetings express about grief, guilt, love, memory, sex, and suicidal urges. This book also explores why and how paths to recovery open for these ghost-visited survivors in the fiction of catastrophe from the early twenty-first century.

Preliminary Material -- Introduction -- Defining Gothic-postmodernism -- On Gothic Terror -- Generic Investigations: What is 'Gothic'? -- Postmodernism -- The Gothic and Postmodernism - At the Interface -- Gothic Literary Transformations: The Fin de Siecle and Modernism -- Introduction to Part II -- The Gothic-postmodernist Novel: Three Models -- Gothic Metafiction: The Satanic Verses -- Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita -- Textual Terrors of the Self: Haunting and Hyperreality in Lunar Park -- Conclusion -- Bibliography -- Index.

In the context of the current explosion of interest in Gothic literature and popular culture, this interdisciplinary collection of essays explores for the first time the rich and long-standing relationship between war and the Gothic. Critics have described the global Seven Year’s War as the "crucible" from which the Gothic genre emerged in the eighteenth century. Since then, the Gothic has been a privileged mode for representing violence and extreme emotions and situations. Covering the period from the American Civil War to the War on Terror, this collection examines how the Gothic has provided writers an indispensable toolbox for narrating, critiquing, and representing real and fictional wars. The book also sheds light on the overlap and complicity between Gothic aesthetics and certain aspects of military experience, including the bodily violation and mental dissolution of combat, the dehumanization of "others," psychic numbing, masculinity in crisis, and the subjective experience of trauma and memory. Engaging with popular forms such as young adult literature, gaming, and comic books, as well as literature, film, and visual art, War Gothic provides an important and timely overview of war-themed Gothic art and narrative by respected experts in the field of Gothic Studies. This book makes important contributions to the fields of Gothic Literature, War Literature, Popular Culture, American Studies, and Film, Television & Media.

Children’s literature today is dominated by the gothic mode, and it is in children’s gothic fictions that we find the implications of cultural change most radically questioned and explored. This collection of essays looks at what is happening in the children’s Gothic now when traditional monsters have become the heroes, when new monsters have come into play, when globalisation brings Harry Potter into China and yaoguai into the children’s Gothic, and when childhood itself and children’s literature as a genre can no longer be thought of as an uncontested space apart from the debates and power struggles of an adult domain. We look in detail at series such as The Mortal Instruments, Twilight, Chaos Walking, The Power of Five, Skulduggery Pleasant, and Cirque du Freak; at novels about witches and novels about changelings; at the Gothic in China, Japan and Oceania; and at authors including Celia Rees, Frances Hardinge, Alan Garner and Laini Taylor amongst many others. At a time when the energies and anxieties of children’s novels can barely be contained anymore within the genre of children’s literature, spilling over into YA and adult literature, we need to pay attention. Weird things are happening and they matter.

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.

The Gothic World offers an overview of this popular field whilst also extending critical debate in exciting new directions such as film, politics, fashion, architecture, fine art and cyberculture. Structured around the principles of time, space and practice, and including a detailed general introduction, the five sections look at: Gothic Histories Gothic Spaces Gothic Readers and Writers Gothic Spectacle Contemporary Impulses. The Gothic World seeks to account for the Gothic as a multi-faceted, multi-dimensional force, as a style, an aesthetic experience and a mode of cultural expression that traverses genres, forms, media, disciplines and national boundaries and creates, indeed, its own ‘World’.

After 9/11, the world felt the “shock and awe” of the War on Terror. But that war also exploded inside novels, films, comics, and gaming. Danel Olson investigates why the paranormal, ghostly, and conspiratorial entered such media between 2002-2022, and how this Gothic presence connects to the most recent theories on PTSD. Set in New York/Gotham, Afghanistan, Iraq, and CIA black sites, the traumatic and weird works interrogated here ask how killing affects the killers. The protagonists probed are artillery, infantry, and armored-cavalry soldiers; military intelligence; the Air Force; counter-terrorism officers of the NYPD, NCIS, FBI, and CIA; and even the ultimate crime-fighting vigilante, Batman.