The Gothic

This book explores the many ways Gothic literature and media have informed videogame design. Through a series of detailed case studies, Videogames and the Gothic illustrates the extent to which particular tropes of Gothic culture –neo-medieval aesthetics, secret-filled labyrinthine spaces, the sense of a dark past impacting upon the present – have been appropriated by and transformed within digital games. Moving beyond the study of the generic influences of horror on digital gaming, Ewan Kirkland focuses in on the Gothic, a less visceral mode tending towards the unsettling, the uncertain and the uncanny. He explores the extent to which imagery, storylines and narrative preoccupations taken from Gothic fiction facilitate the affordances and limitations of the videogame medium. A core contention of this book is that videogames have developed as an inherently Gothic form of popular entertainment. Arguing for close proximity between Gothic culture and the videogame medium itself, this book will be a key contribution to both Gothic and digital game scholarship; as such, it will have resonance with scholars and students in both areas, as well as those interested in Gothic novels, media and popular culture, digital games and interactive fiction.

The Gothic is wildly diverse. It can refer to ecclesiastical architecture, supernatural fiction, cult horror films, and a distinctive style of rock music. It has influenced political theorists and social reformers, as well as Victorian home décor and contemporary fashion. Nick Groom shows how the Gothic has come to encompass so many meanings by telling the story of the Gothic from the ancient tribe who sacked Rome to the alternative subculture of the present day. This unique Very Short Introduction reveals that the Gothic has predominantly been a way of understanding and responding to the past. Time after time, the Gothic has been invoked in order to reveal what lies behind conventional history. It is a way of disclosing secrets, whether in the constitutional politics of seventeenth-century England or the racial politics of the United States. While contexts change, the Gothic perpetually regards the past with fascination, both yearning and horrified. It reminds us that neither societies nor individuals can escape the consequences of their actions. The anatomy of the Gothic is richly complex and perversely contradictory, and so the thirteen chapters here range deliberately widely. This is the first time that the entire story of the Gothic has been written as a continuous history: from the historians of late antiquity to the gardens of Georgian England, from the mediaeval cult of the macabre to German Expressionist cinema, from Elizabethan Revenge Tragedy to American consumer society, from folk ballads to vampires, from the past to the present. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.

Like an armor-toothed belt across Italy’s upper thigh, the Gothic Line was the most fortified and fiercely defended position the German army had yet thrown in the path of the Allied forces. On August 25, 1944, it fell to I Canadian Corps to spearhead the famed Eighth Army’s major offensive, intended to rip through it. The 1st Infantry and 5th Armored Divisions advanced into a killing ground covered by thousands of machine-gun, antitank gun positions, and pillboxes expertly sited behind minefields and dense thickets of barbed wire. Never had the Germans in Italy brought so much artillery to bear or deployed such a great number of tanks. For 28 days, the battle raged as the Allied troops slugged an ever deeper hole into the German defences. The Metauro River, the Foglia River, Point 204, Tomba Di Pesaro, Coriano Ridge, San Martino, and San Fortunato became place names seared into the memories of those who fought there. They fought in a dust-choked land under a searing sun which by battle's end was reduced to a guagmire by rain. But they prevailed and on September 22 won the ground overlooking the Po River Valley, opening the way for the next phase of the Allied advance.

Drawing together literature, media, and philosophy, Ghostly Apparitions provides a new model for media archaeology and its transformation of intellectual and literary history. Stefan Andriopoulos examines new media technologies and distinct cultural realms, tracing connections between Kant’s philosophy and the magic lantern’s phantasmagoria, the Gothic novel and print culture, and spiritualist research and the invention of television. As Kant was writing about the possibility of spiritual apparitions, the emerging medium of the phantasmagoria used hidden magic lanterns to startle audiences with ghostly projections. Andriopoulos juxtaposes the philosophical arguments of German idealism with contemporaneous occultism and ghost shows. In close readings of Kant, Hegel, and Schopenhauer, he traces the diverging modes in which these authors appropriated figures of optical media and spiritualist notions. The spectral apparitions from this period also intersect with the rise of popular print culture. Andriopoulos explores the circulation of ostensibly authentic ghost narratives and the Gothic novel, which was said to produce “reading addiction” and a loss of reality. Romantic representations of animal magnetism and clairvoyance similarly blurred the boundary between fiction and reality. The final chapter of Ghostly Apparitions extends this archaeology of new media into the early twentieth century. Tracing a reciprocal inter_action between occultism and engineering, Andriopoulos uncovers how theories and devices of psychical research enabled the emergence of television.

This book debates a crossover between the Gothic and the medical imagination in the Romantic period. It explores the gore and uncertainty typical of medical experimentation, and expands the possibilities of medical theories in a speculative space by a focus on Gothic novels, short stories, poetry, drama and chapbooks. By comparing the Gothic’s collection of unsavoury tropes to morbid anatomy’s collection of diseased organs, the author argues that the Gothic’s prioritisation of fear and gore gives it access to nonnormative bodies, reallocating medical and narrative agency to bodies considered otherwise powerless. Each chapter pairs a trope with a critical medical debate, granting silenced bodies power over their own narratives: the reanimated corpse confronts fears about vitalism; the skeleton exposes fears about pain; the unreliable corpse feeds on fears of dissection; the devil redirects fears about disability; the dangerous narrative manipulates fears of contagion and vaccination.

This guide provides an overview of the most significant issues and debates in Gothic studies. The guide is divided into four parts: The opening section explains the origins and development of the term ‘Gothic’, considers the particular features of the Gothic within specific periods, and explores its evolution in both literary and non-literary forms, such as art, architecture and film. The following section contains extended entries on major writers of the Gothic, pointing to the most significant features of their work. The third section features authoritative readings of key works, ranging from Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto to Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho. Finally, the text considers recurrent concerns of the Gothic such as persecution and paranoia, key motifs such as the haunted castle, and figures such as the vampire and the monster. Supplementary material includes a chronology of key Gothic texts, listing literature and film from 1757 to 2000, and a comprehensive guide to further reading.

The late 1960s and early 1970s saw the birth of modern feminism, the sexual revolution, and strong growth in the mass-market publishing industry. Women made up a large part of the book market, and Gothic fiction became a higher popular staple. Victoria Holt, Mary Stewart and Phyllis Whitney emerged as prominent authors, while the standardized paperback Gothic sold in the millions. Pitched at middle-class women of all ages, Gothics paved the way for contemporary fiction categories such as urban fantasy, paranormal romance and vampire erotica. Though not as popular today as they once were, Gothic paperbacks retain a cult following--and the books themselves have become collectors' items. They were also the first popular novels to present strong heroines as agents of liberation and transformation. This work offers the missing chapters of the Gothic story, from the imaginative creations of Ann Radcliffe and the Bronte sisters to the bestseller 50 Shades of Grey.