Welcome to our Halloween 2024 reading list! This year, we’re excited to present a diverse collection of new and bestselling titles spanning all genres of Gothic Studies. Whether you’re drawn to promethean horror, supernatural creatures, eerie gothic gardens, or monstrous beings, there’s something here for every reader.
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This accessible English translation of the notorious and highly influential treatise of 1487 offers a glimpse into the mind of a medieval witch hunter.
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 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.
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.
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 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 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.
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.
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.
Decadent daughters and monstrous mothers
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.
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.
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...
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 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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
Monstrous media/spectral subjects
Explores the intersection of monsters, ghosts, representation and technology in Gothic texts from the nineteenth century to the present.
A comprehensive study of how different Gothic forms have adapted, engaged with and represented the neoliberal agenda across the globe.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The gothic novel in Ireland, c. 1760-1829
A compelling account of the development of gothic literature in late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth century Ireland.
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.
Cowboy Hamlets and zombie Romeos
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.
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.
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.
EcoGothic gardens in the long nineteenth century
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.
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...
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.
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.
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 book examines the role of supernatural bodies in public debates about religion, science, culture and modernity in modern Britain and Ireland. In turn, the prism of supernatural bodies reveals how those debates were interlinked, and how the forms of knowledge that informed them were produced.
The supernatural in early modern Scotland
This book is a collection of chapters on supernatural belief and practice in Scotland between 1500 and 1800. It deals with elite culture - from political prophecy to astrology, theology and poetic visions. And it deals with popular culture - from trances and visionary encounters with ghosts and fairies, to folkloric angels and Second Sight.
A defence of witchcraft belief
This edition of a previously unpublished manuscript defence of witchcraft belief offers a unique insight into learned opinion on the subject in Elizabethan England. It includes a comprehensive analytical introduction and will appeal to scholars with an interest in witchcraft across disciplinary boundaries.
This book is the first major study of England's biggest and best-known witch trial which took place in 1612, when ten witches were arraigned and hung in the village of Pendle in Lancashire.