Gothic Afterlives

Gothic Afterlives examines the intersecting dimensions of contemporary Gothic horror and remakes scholarship, bringing together innovative perspectives from different areas of study. The research compiled in this collection covers a wide range of examples, including not only literature but also film, television, video games, and digital media remakes. Gothic Afterlives signals the cultural and conceptual impact of Gothic horror on transmedia production, with a focus on reimagining and remaking. While diverse in content and approach, all chapters pivot on two important points: first, they reflect some of the core preoccupations of Gothic horror by subverting cultural and social certainties about notions such as the body, technology, consumption, human nature, digitalization, scientific experimentation, national identity, memory, and gender and by challenging the boundaries between human and inhuman, self and Other, and good and evil. Second, and perhaps most important, all chapters in the collection collectively show what happens when well-known Gothic horror narratives are adapted and remade into different contexts, highlighting the implications of the mode-shifting registers, platforms, and chronologies in the process. As a collection, Gothic Afterlives hones in on contemporary sociocultural experiences and identities as they appear in contemporary popular culture and in the stories told and retold in the twenty-first century.

An exploration of the treatment of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein in popular art and culture, this book examines adaptations in film, comics, theatre, art, video-games and more, to illuminate how the novel's myth has evolved in the two centuries since its publication. Divided into four sections, The Afterlives of Frankenstein considers the cultural dialogues Mary Shelley's novel has engaged with in specific historical moments; the extraordinary examples of how Frankenstein has suffused our cultural consciousness; and how the Frankenstein myth has become something to play with, a locus for reinvention and imaginative interpretation. In the final part, artists respond to the Frankenstein legacy today, reintroducing it into cultural circulation in ways that speak creatively to current anxieties and concerns. Bringing together popular interventions that riff off Shelley's major themes, chapters survey such works as Frankenstein in Baghdad, Bob Dylan's recent “My Own Version of You”, the graphic novel series Destroyer with its Black cast of characters, Jane Louden's The Mummy!, the first Japanese translation of Frankenstein, “The New Creator”, the iconic Frankenstein mask and Kenneth Brannagh's Mary Shelley's Frankenstein film. A deep-dive into the crevasses of Frankenstein adaptation and lore, this volume offers compelling new directions for scholarship surrounding the novel through dynamic critical and creative responses to Shelley's original.

Since the development of British Aestheticism in the 1870s, the concept of irony has focused a series of anxieties which are integral to modern literary practice. Examining some of the most important debates in post-Romantic aesthetics through highly focused textual readings of authors from Walter Pater and Henry James to Samuel Beckett and Alan Hollinghurst, this study investigates the dialectical position of irony in Aestheticism and its twentieth-century afterlives. Aesthetic Afterlives constructs a far-reaching theoretical narrative by positioning Victorian Aestheticism as the basis of Literary Modernity. Aestheticism's cultivation of irony and reflexive detachment was central to this legacy, but it was also the focus of its own self-critique. Anxieties about the concept and practice of irony persisted through Modernism, and have recently been positioned in Hollinghurst's work as a symptom of the political stasis within post-modern culture. Referring to the recent debates about the 'new aestheticism' and the politics of aesthetics, Eastham asks how a utopian Aestheticism can be reconstructed from the problematics of irony and aesthetic autonomy that haunted writers from Pater to Adorno.

Gothic Mash-Ups explores the role of intertextuality in Gothic storytelling through the analysis of texts from diverse periods and media. Drawing on recent scholarship on Gothic remix and adaptation, the contributors examine crossover fictions, multi-source film and comic book adaptations, neo-Victorian pastiches, performance magic, monster mashes, and intertextual Gothic works of various kinds. Their chapters investigate many critical issues related to Gothic mash-up, including authorship, originality, intellectual property, fandom, commercialization, and canonicity. Although varied in approach, the chapters all explore how Gothic storytellers make new stories out of older ones, relying on a mix of appropriation and innovation. Covering many examples of mash-up, from nineteenth-century Gothic novels to twenty-first-century video games and interactive fiction, this collection builds from the premise that the Gothic is a fundamentally hybrid genre.

In this edited collection exploring Disney’s dark side, attention to Disney’s Gothic reveals the ways through which Disney productions construct and reinforce conceptions of normalcy and deviance in relation to shifting understandings of morality, social roles, and identity categories.

Neo-Gothic Narratives defines and theorises what, exactly, qualifies as such a text, what mobilises the employment of the Gothic to speak to our own times, whether nostalgia plays a role and whether there is room for humour besides the sobriety and horror in these narratives across various media. What attracts us to the Gothic that makes us want to resurrect, reinvent, echo it? Why do we let the Gothic redefine us? Why do we let it haunt us? Does it speak to us through intertexuality, self-reflectivity, metafiction, immersion, affect? Are we reclaiming the history of women and other subalterns in the Gothic that had been denied in other forms of history? Are we revisiting the trauma of English colonisation and seeking national identity? Or are we simply tourists who enjoy cruising through the otherworld? The essays in this volume investigate both the readerly experience of Neo-Gothic narratives as well as their writerly pastiche.

This dynamic multidisciplinary collection of essays examines the uncanny, eerie, wondrous, and dreaded dimensions of oceans, seas, waterways, and watery forms of the oceanic South, a haunted global precinct stretching across the Pacific, Southern and Indian Oceans, and around Australasia, Oceania, Aotearoa New Zealand, and South Africa. Presenting work from leading scholars, the chapters contend with the contemporary fears and repressions associated with the return of environmental traumas, colonial traumas, and the spectres of the precolonial deep past that resurface in the present. The book examines the manifestations of these Gothic aesthetics and propensities across a range of watery spaces – seas, oceans, waterholes, and swamps – in vessels, ports, shorelines, journeys, strandings, and transformations, in amphibious bodies and the drowned, all of which promote haunted engagement with the materiality of water. This collection renews the interdisciplinary breadth of Gothic criticism and the relevance of Gothic affect and sensibility to understanding the histories and cultures of the oceanic South through an exploration of the rarely considered uncanniness of the oceans, waterways, and aqueous forms of the Southern Hemisphere, haunted by colonial and precolonial imaginings of the Antipodes, the legacies of imperialism, and the “double vision” between Oceanic and settler-colonial epistemologies, and the encroaching menace of climate change. Comprising diverse contributions from screen, literary, and cultural studies, environmental humanities, human geography, and creative practice in ecological sound art, and poetry, the collection examines the uncanny and the sublime in watery fictions and authentic settings of a range of aqueous southern forms – ocean surfaces and depths, haunted shallows and reefs, moist mangroves, moss and lichen, the awesome horror of tidal apocalypse. This book will be illuminating reading for students and scholars of cultural studies, postcolonial studies, area studies, and Indigenous studies.

This collection of essays offers insights into the ways in which eighteenth-century novels have been adapted and appropriated by later writers. It will be of interest to students of the rise of the novel, interdisciplinary approaches to literature, and the developing field of adaptation studies.