Fashioning Gothic Bodies

This innovative book explores the role played by clothing in the discourses of the Gothic. It makes an explicit connection between the veils, masks and disguises of Gothic convention, and historically-specific fashion discourses, from the revealing chemise-dress popularized by Queen Marie Antoinette to the subcultural style of contemporary Goths. In so doing it sheds new light on the cultural construction of Gothic bodies. Taking an original interdisciplinary approach, Catherine Spooner offers readings of literary, cinematic and popular cultural texts in the context of fashion from the 1790s to the 1990s. Progressing chronologically from the novels of Radcliffe and Lewis through the "sensation" fiction of the Victorian period and the Gothic fiction of the fin-de-siècle, Fashioning Gothic Bodies culminates with twentieth-century film and the supposed resurgence of the Gothic in pre-Millennial culture.

An intriguing scholarly investigation, not so much of the ways the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries articulated pain, but of the ways in which pain itself articulated the late eighteenth-century experience. Through analysis of novels, plays, and poems, the author explores the transition from sensibility as a sense of "selflessness" to Romanticism, which puts the self in the foreground as the mediating consciousness. His tightly focused discussion sets a starting point for further critical investigation of the subject.

The gothic, particularly in its contemporary incarnations, is often constructed around largely disembodied concepts such as spectrality or the haunted. Body Gothic offers a counter-narrative that reinstates the importance of viscerality to the gothic mode. It argues that contemporary discourses surrounding our bodies are crucial to our understanding of the social messages in fictional mutilation and of the pleasures we may derive from it. This book considers a number of literary and cinematic movements that have, over the past three decades, purposely turned the body into a meaningful gothic topos. Each chapter in Body Gothic is dedicated to a different corporeal subgenre: splatterpunk, body horror, the new avant-pulp, the slaughterhouse novel, torture porn and surgical horror are all covered in its pages. Close readings of key texts by Clive Barker, Richard Laymon, Joseph D'Lacey, Matthew Stokoe, Tony White or Stanley Manly are provided alongside in-depth analyses of landmark films such as Re-Animator (1985), The Fly (1986), Saw (2004), Hostel (2005), The Human Centipede (2011) and American Mary (2012).

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.

Revealing Bodies turns to the eighteenth century to ask a question with continuing relevance: what kinds of knowledge condition our understanding of our own bodies? Focusing on the tension between particularity and generality that inheres in intellectual discourse about the body, Revealing Bodies explores the disconnection between the body understood as a general form available to knowledge and the body experienced as particularly one's own. Erin Goss locates this division in contemporary bodily exhibits, such as Gunther von Hagens' Body Worlds, and in eighteenth-century anatomical discourse. Her readings of the corporeal aesthetics of Edmund Burke's Philosophical Enquiry, William Blake's cosmological depiction of the body's origin in such works as The First] Book of Urizen, and Mary Tighe's reflection on the relation between love and the soul in Psyche; or, The Legend of Love demonstrate that the idea of the body that grounds knowledge in an understanding of anatomy emerges not as fact but as fiction. Ultimately, Revealing Bodies describes how thinkers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and bodily exhibitions in the twentieth and twenty-first call upon allegorized figurations of the body to conceal the absence of any other available means to understand that which is uniquely our own: our existence as bodies in the world.

From Jack the Ripper to Frankenstein, Halloween customs to Alexander McQueen collections, Fashioning Horror examines how terror is fashioned visually, symbolically, and materially through fashion and costume, in literature, film, and real life. With a series of case studies that range from sensationalist cinema and Slasher films to true crime and nineteenth-century literature, the volume investigates the central importance of clothing to the horror genre, and broadens our understanding of both material and popular culture. Arguing that dress is fundamental to our understanding of character and setting within horror, the chapters also reveal how the grotesque and horrific is at the center of fashion itself, with its potential for instability, disguise, and carnivalesque subversion. Packed with original research, and bringing together a range of international scholars, the book is the first to thoroughly examine the aesthetics of terror and the role of fashion in the construction of horror.

What do we mean when we talk about 'the body'? This Reader challenges the assumption that it can be invoked as a neutral, or indeed natural, point of reference in critical discussion or cultural practice. The essays collected here foreground the historical construction of 'the body' throughout a range of discourses from the modern to the postmodern, and seek to present it not as a biological 'given', but as a contestable signifier in the articulation of identities.

The first book-length study of witchcraft and adolescence in American popular culture. Will provide readers with a comprehensive overview of teenage witches in literature/media. Uses a novel theoretical framework (Foucauldian and Deleuzian theory, new materialism, theories of embodiment). Adds a new perspective to a topic (female monstrosity) dominated by psychoanalytical theory. Studies a diverse range of texts (film, television, literary and popular fiction, comics, YA fiction). Will appeal to scholars of feminism, media history, girlhood studies, horror, the Gothic, etc.