Gothic Studies reading list 2024

This collection explores the genesis of John Polidori's foundational novella The Vampyre (1819). It then tracks his bloodsucking progeny across the centuries and maps his disquieting legacy from the melodramatic vampire theatricals in the 1820s, through further Gothic fictions and horror films, to twenty-first century paranormal romance.

This book explores how literature, theatre and music revive the dead to explore the dynamics of grief and mourning. Combining expressive and analytical writing, it offers a critical poetics of loss to show how ghosts, scenes of mourning, memories of reading or viewing, and acoustic fragments, all reanimate the dead in different ways.

This book presents a cultural history of Promethean Horror in the modern age, tracing the rise of a sub-genre of gothic fiction in the twentieth-century and examining post-modern revisions of Modernist "Promethean" tropes in an eclectic range of gothic, fantasy and SF writing.

Diverse ecoGothic interpretations of Victorian gardens and their reflections of human disturbance, using material ecocritical methodology to examine uncanny vegetal agency. Monster plants, mystical trees, fairy groves, grim lakes and talking flowers are among the topics, seen through prose, poetry and painting.

This collection of essays considers the significance of graveyards in Gothic literature, film, television and video games. The chapters incorporate discussion of Gothic texts from around the world, offering a compelling new account of the graveyard's importance as a key location for Gothic art and culture.

This interdisciplinary text combines an attention to socio-historical and cultural contexts with a rigorous close reading of literary, artistic, and televisual works, both classic and lesser known. It investigates how the Gothic and the concepts of dreams and nightmares have intersected from the mid-eighteenth century to the present day.

Spectral Dickens posits a spectral dimension of literary character. By analyzing Dickens' illustrated novels through a frame of ontologically haunted concepts like the Freudian uncanny, Derridean spectrality, and the Lacanian Real, Bove's work haunts the opposition between fictional character and real person with the uncanniness of literary forms.

This is the first scholarly collection to focus on the special importance of British cinema to folk horror. The chapters consider the artistic styles, historical contexts, cultural tensions and cinematic fears that distinguish folk horror from other forms of horror and from traditional ways of viewing the folk.

This volume of essays presents innovative research from a variety of perspectives on the cultural significance of wolves, children raised by wolves, and werewolves, as portrayed in different media and genres.

Haunted Britain offers a new emotional and cultural history of the Great War as told through the spiritualist and psychical research movements between 1914 and 1939.

Suicide and the Gothic is the first study of the representation of suicide in Gothic texts from the eighteenth century to the present. Poems, short stories, novels, films and video games are covered from European, American and Asian contexts.

This is the first comprehensive history of goth music and culture. Across more than 500 pages, John Robb explores the origins and legacy of this enduring scene, drawing on his own experience and interviews with a host of bands, from Siouxsie and the Banshees and The Cure to Throbbing Gristle.

This book charts a psychologist's journey to understand one of the most unusual experiences known to humankind: the feeling that someone or something is there when we are alone. A tour-de-force through contemporary psychology, psychiatry, neuroscience and philosophy, Presence is the story of who we carry with us, at all times, as parts of ourselves.

Transplantation is a boundary practice unsettling distinctions between self and other, life and death. This book identifies a Gothic mode in representations of the practice in literature, film and science from the nineteenth century to the present, considering hybrid bodies and precarious lives under neoliberal late capitalism.

The book focuses on the interpretation of Shakespeare film adaptations in commercial film genres, from the classical Hollywood era to contemporary blockbuster cinema. Its genre-based analyses revisit old favourites and rediscover long-forgotten treasures of film history, taking adaptation studies in a new direction.

Giving an overview of contemporary Nordic Gothic in different media as well as tracing its history, Nordic Gothic also provides a number of case studies and in-depth analyses of individual narratives. It explores Nordic folklore, settings and identities as well as making visible cultural anxieties haunting the welfare state.

The dome of thought is an accessible and lively history of the Victorian pseudoscience of phrenology. It makes extensive use of the popular accounts found in contemporary newspapers and journals, the majority of this material being reproduced for the first time since the nineteenth century.

The arrangement of the material, indicated by the chapter headings, draws attention to a variety of areas not normally associated with dominant perceptions of Angela Carter. These encompass food, fashion, art, poetry, music, performance and translation, which will be discussed in a number of historical, literary and cultural contexts.

A compelling account of the development of gothic literature in late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth century Ireland.

Mid-Century Gothic offers a fresh perspective on the cultural moment that followed World War II, and discovers a deep sense of unease mingling with optimism about the future. By reassessing the novels, films, visual culture and technologies of the period, the book argues that gothicism itself was redefined by the upstart objects of modernity.

The second edition of Peter Hutchings's landmark work on British horror cinema, featuring later writings by Hutchings and a new introduction by film historian Johnny Walker.

Challenges dominant accounts of gender and sexuality in Gothic literature by demonstrating the complexities of the incest thematic through interdisciplinary readings of incest in texts from 1764-1847.

An interdisciplinary collection providing new perspective on the interface between the gothic and death, with fresh readings of established, overlooked and recent Gothic works across a variety of cultural and literary forms.

A comprehensive study of how different Gothic forms have adapted, engaged with and represented the neoliberal agenda across the globe.

Drawing on a range of popular Gothic and Victorian novels, poems and short stories, this book provides the first full length study of representations of death and dying in Gothic texts between 1740 and 1914.

An adventurous and wide-ranging survey of Gothic media, this book investigates everything from oil paintings to album cover art, magic lanterns to video games.

Explores the intersection of monsters, ghosts, representation and technology in Gothic texts from the nineteenth century to the present.

She-Wolf explores the cultural history of the female werewolf, from her first appearance in medieval literature to recent incarnations in film, television and popular literature.

This collection of essays redefines what gothic has become in the contemporary world, examining the idea of an emerging gothic that is inextricable from the broader global context in which it circulates. Globalgothic expands the horizons of the genre in diverse new and exciting ways.

This book will provide the first study of how the Gothic engages with ecocritical ideas. The book's focus is from the late eighteenth century to the present day, via consideration of a number of national and global contexts and different media including short stories, novels and films.

Decadent daughters and monstrous mothers interrogates Angela Carter's feminist politics through the lens of European Gothic. It illuminates her ambivalent relation to her European literary forebears, reveals her rich knowledge of French literature and offers fresh insights into her literary practices afforded by newly available archival material.

Explores the ways in which the unashamedly disturbing conventions of international horror cinema allow audiences to engage with the traumatic legacy of the recent past in a manner that has serious implications for the ways in which we conceive of ourselves both as gendered individuals and as members of a particular nation-state.

This innovative book is the first to make an explicit link between constructions of the body in Gothic literature and film and historically specific fashion discourse, from the 1790s to the 1990s.

This is the first book-length study of the uncanny, an important topic for contemporary thinking on literature, film, philosophy, psychoanalysis, feminism and queer history.

The only collection to concentrate on the European Gothic - writing in English, French, German, Russian and Spanish. Charts the rich process of cross-fertilisation, especially regarding Anglo-French...

How is it that the age of Enlightenment gave rise to the genre of the literary ghost story? What did the term 'Gothic' mean, when Horace Walpole used it in the subtitle of his experimental novel The...

One of the few books to address the horror film from any kind of critical position.. Unique - The first history of the horror film to approach it from a queer perspective.. Written with detail and thoroughness...