Contemporary Gothic

Modern Gothic culture alternately fascinates, horrifies, or bewilders many of us. We cringe at pictures of Marilyn Manson, cheer for Buffy in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and try not to stare at the pierced and tattooed teens we pass on the streets. But what is it about this dark and morbidly morose aesthetic that fascinates us today? In Contemporary Gothic, Catherine Spooner probes the reasons behind the prevalence of the Gothic in popular culture and how it has inspired innovative new work in film, literature, music, and art. Spooner traces the emergence of the Gothic subculture over the past few decades and examines the various aspects of contemporary society that revolve around the grotesque, abject, and artificial. The Gothic is continually resituated in different spheres of culture, she reveals, as she explores the transplantation of the “street” Goth style to haute couture runway looks by fashion designers. The Gothic also appears in a number of surprisingly diverse representations, and Spoonerconsiders them all, from the artistic excesses of Jake and Dinos Chapman to the fashions of Alexander McQueen, and from the mind-bending films of David Lynch to the abnormal postmodern subjects of Joel-Peter Witkin’s photography. In an engaging way, Contemporary Gothic argues that this style ultimately balances a number of contradictions—the grotesque and incorporeal, authentic self-expression and campiness, mass popularity and cult appeal, comfort and outrage—and these contradictions make the Gothic a crucial expression of contemporary cultural currents. Whether seeking to understand the stories behind the TV show Supernatural or to extract deeper meanings from modern literature, Contemporary Gothic is a lively and virtually unparalleled study of the modern Gothic sensibility that pervades popular culture today.

Gothic as a form of fiction-making has played a major role in Western culture since the late eighteenth century. Here fourteen world-class experts on the Gothic provide thorough and revealing accounts of this haunting-to-horrifying type of fiction from the 1760s (the decade of The Castle of Otranto, the first so-called Gothic story ) to the end of the twentieth century (an era haunted by filmed and computerized Gothic simulations). Along the way, these essays explore the connections of Gothic fictions to political and industrial revolutions, the realistic novel, the theatre, Romantic and post-Romantic poetry, nationalism and racism from Europe to America, colonized and post-colonial populations, the rise of film and other visual technologies, the struggles between high and popular culture, changing psychological attitudes towards human identity, gender and sexuality, and the obscure lines between life and death, sanity and madness. The volume also includes a chronology and guides to further reading.

A #1 New York Times bestseller, The Thirteenth Tale is part contemporary, part historical with mysterious threads about family secrets and the magic of books and storytelling weaving the two together. All children mythologize their birth . . . So begins the prologue of reclusive author Vida Winter's collection of stories, which are as famous for the mystery of the missing thirteenth tale as they are for the delight and enchantment of the twelve that do exist. The enigmatic Winter has spent six decades creating various outlandish histories for herself. Now old and ailing, she at last wants to tell the truth about her extraordinary past. She summons biographer Margaret Lea, a young woman who is struck by a very curious parallel between Winter's life and her own. As Vida exposes the history she meant to bury for good, Margaret is mesmerized. It is a tale of gothic strangeness, of a remote estate, feral children, a governess, a ghost, and a devastating fire. In this love letter to reading, Diane Setterfield will keep you guessing, make you wonder, move you to tears and laughter and, in the end, deposit you breathless yet satisfied back upon the shore of your everyday world.

“Simply put, there is absolutely nothing on the market with the range of ambition of this strikingly eclectic collection of essays. Not only is it impossible to imagine a more comprehensive view of the subject, most readers – even specialists in the subject – will find that there are elements of the Gothic genre here of which they were previously unaware.” - Barry Forshaw, Author of British Gothic Cinema and Sex and Film The Palgrave Handbook of Contemporary Gothic is the most comprehensive compendium of analytic essays on the modern Gothic now available, covering the vast and highly significant period from 1918 to 2019. The Gothic sensibility, over 200 years old, embraces its dark past whilst anticipating the future. From demons and monsters to post- apocalyptic fears and ecological fantasies, Gothic is thriving as never before in the arts and in popular culture. This volume is made up of 62 comprehensive chapters with notes and extended bibliographies contributed by scholars from around the world. The chapters are written not only for those engaged in academic research but also to be accessible to students and dedicated followers of the genre. Each chapter is packed with analysis of the Gothic in both theory and practice, as the genre has mutated and spread over the last hundred years. Starting in 1918 with the impact of film on the genre's development, and moving through its many and varied international incarnations, each chapter chronicles the history of the gothic milieu from the movies to gaming platforms and internet memes, television and theatre. The volume also looks at how Gothic intersects with fashion, music and popular culture: a multi-layered, multi-ethnic, even a trans-gendered experience as we move into the twenty first century.

This ground-breaking volume is the first of its kind to examine the extraordinary prevalence and appeal of the Gothic in contemporary British theatre and performance. Chapters range from considerations of the Gothic in musical theatre and literary adaptation, to explorations of the Gothic’s power to haunt contemporary playwriting, macabre tourism and site-specific performance. By taking familiar Gothic motifs, such as the Gothic body, the monster and Gothic theatricality, and bringing them to a new contemporary stage, this collection provides a fresh and comprehensive take on a popular genre. Whilst the focus of the collection falls upon Gothic drama, the contents of the book will embrace an interdisciplinary appeal to scholars and students in the fields of theatre studies, literature studies, tourism studies, adaptation studies, cultural studies, and history.

This lively collection of essays aims to chart the survival of the gothic strain - the dark, the forbidding, the alienated, the fantastic - in a spectrum of popular and 'high cultural' forms of representation.

This study examines theological themes and resonances in post-1970 Gothic fiction. It argues that contemporary Gothic is not simply a secularised genre, but rather one that engages creatively – and often subversively – with theological texts and traditions. This creative engagement is reflected in Gothic fiction’s exploration of theological concepts including sin and evil, Christology and the messianic, resurrection, eschatology and apocalypse. Through readings of fiction by Gothic and horror writers including Stephen King, Joyce Carol Oates, Peter Straub, William Peter Blatty and others, this book demonstrates that Christianity continues to haunt the Gothic imagination and that the genre’s openness to the mysterious, numinous and non-rational opens space in which to explore religious beliefs and experiences less easily accessible to more overtly realist forms of representation. The book offers a new perspective on contemporary Gothic fiction that will be of interest to students and scholars of contemporary Gothic and of the relationship between literature and religion more generally.

This book explores the development of queer Gothic fiction, contextualizing it with reference to representations of queer sexualities and genders in eighteenth and nineteenth-century Gothic, as well as the sexual-political perspectives generated by the 1970s lesbian and gay liberation movements and the development of queer theory in the 1990s. The book examines the roles that Gothic motifs and narrative strategies play in depicting aspects of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transsexual and intersex experience in contemporary Gothic fiction. Gothic motifs discussed include spectrality, the haunted house, the vampire, doppelganger and monster. Regional Gothic and the contribution that Gothic tropes make to queer historical fiction and historiography receive attention, as does the AIDS narrative. Female Gothic and feminist perspectives are also explored. Writers discussed include Peter Ackroyd, Vincent Brome, Jim Grimsley, Alan Hollinghurst, Randall Kenan, Meg Kingston, Michelle Paver, Susan Swan, Louise Tondeur, Sarah Waters, Kathleen Winter and Jeanette Winterson.