Books in the Gothic Literary Studies series

This book provides new insights into how Gothic Horror as a whole started, and encourages the reader to think of the relations between such books and films as one vibrant set of energies.

The Gothic and the Carnivalesque in American Culture offers a new account of the American Gothic. Gothic studies, the field that explores horrid and frightful narratives, usually describes the genre as exploring genuine historical fears, crises and traumas, yet this does not account for the ways in which the genre is often a source of wicked delight as much as it is of horror - its audiences laugh as often as they shriek. This book traces the carnivalesque tradition in the American Gothic from the nineteenth into the late twentieth century. It discusses the festivals offered by Poe, Hawthorne and Irving; the celebrations of wickedness offered by the Weird Tales writers, including H. P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard and Clark Ashton Smith; the curious aura attached to Ray Bradbury's stories; the way in which hosted horrors in comics and on television in the 1950s and 1960s taught their mass audiences how to read the genre; Stephen King's nurturing of a new audience for Gothic carnivals in the 1970s and 1980s; and the confluence of Gothic story and Goth subculture in the 1990s.Introduction: BallyhooChapter One: Theory, Practice and Gothic CarnivalChapter Two: 'The Delight of its Horror' - Poe's Carnivals and the Nineteenth-Century American GothicChapter Three: Weird Tales and Pulp SubjunctivityChapter Four: Ray Bradbury and the October AuraChapter Five: Hosted Horrors of the 1950s and 1960sChapter Six: Stephen King, Affect and the Real Limits of Gothic PracticeChapter Seven: Every Day is Halloween - Goth and the GothicConclusion: Waiting for the Great Pumpkin

This book is a comparative study of British and American literature and culture in the 1790s and 1950s. It explores the republican tradition of the British Enlightenment and the effect of its translation and migration to the American colonies. Specifically, it examines in detail the transatlantic influence of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century libertarian and anti-authoritarian thought on British and American Revolutionary culture.

This collection examines Gothic fiction written by female authors in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Analysing works by lesser known authors within a historical context, the collection offers a fresh perspective on women writers and their contributions to Gothic literature.

This book explores the history of the paranormal romance genre; from its origins in the revisionist horror fiction of the 1970s, via its emergence as a minor sub-genre of romantic fiction in the early 1990s, to its contemporary expansion in recent years into an often-controversial genre of mainstream fiction. Tracing the genre from its roots in older Gothic fiction written by and for women, it explores the interconnected histories of Gothic and romantic fiction, from Ann Radcliffe and Jane Austen in the eighteenth century to Buffy, Twilight, True Blood and The Vampire Diaries in the present day. In doing so, it investigates the extent to which the post-Twilight paranormal romance really does represent a break from older traditions of Gothic fiction - and just what it is about the genre that has made it so extraordinarily divisive, captivating millions of readers whilst simultaneously infuriating and repelling so many others.

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).ContentsIntroduction: From Gothic Bodies to Body GothicChapter 1 - SplatterpunkChapter 2 - Body HorrorChapter 3 - The New Avant-PulpChapter 4 - The Slaughterhouse NovelChapter 5 - Torture PornChapter 6 - Surgical HorrorConclusion: The Gothic and the BodyNotesWorks CitedFilmography

Posthuman Gothic is a collection of scholarly essays discussing literary and filmic representations of the posthuman Gothic.

Gothic Invasions investigates the prevalent concern with invasion and war in fin-de-siecle British popular fiction, identifies the role of imperial expansion in generating fears of invasion, and explores how these fears were expressed transgenerically in narratives of invasion drawing strongly upon the conventions and themes of gothic writing.

The werewolf in popular fiction has begun to change rapidly. Literary critics have observed this development and its impact on the werewolf in fiction, with theorists arguing that the modern werewolf offers new possibilities about how we view identity and the self. Although this monograph is preoccupied with the same concerns, it represents a departure from other critical works by analysing the werewolf's subjectivity/identity as a work-in-progress, where the fixed and final form is yet to be arrived at - and may never be fully accomplished. Using the critical theories of Deleuze and Guattari and their concepts of 'multiplicities' and 'becoming', this work argues that the werewolf is in a state of constant evolution as it develops new modes of being in popular fiction. Following on from this examination of lycanthropic subjectivity, the book goes on to examine the significant developments that have resulted from the advent of the werewolf as subject, few of which have received any sustained critical attention to date.

Welsh Gothic, the first study of its kind, introduces readers to the array of Welsh Gothic literature published from 1780 to the present day. Informed by postcolonial and psychoanalytic theory, it argues that many of the fears encoded in Welsh Gothic writing are specific to the history of Welsh people, telling us much about the changing ways in which Welsh people have historically seen themselves and been perceived by others. The first part of the book explores Welsh Gothic writing from its beginnings in the last decades of the eighteenth century to 1997. The second part focuses on figures specific to the Welsh Gothic genre who enter literature from folk lore and local superstition, such as the sin-eater, cwn Annwn (hellhounds), dark druids and Welsh witches.ContentsPrologue: 'A Long Terror'PART I: HAUNTED BY HISTORY1. Cambria Gothica (1780s-1820s)2. An Underworld of One's Own (1830s-1900s).3. Haunted Communities (1900s-1940s).4. Land of the Living Dead (1940s-1997).PART II: 'THINGS THAT GO BUMP IN THE CELTIC TWILIGHT'5. Witches, Druids and the Hounds of Annwn.6. The Sin-eaterEpilogue: Post-devolution GothicNotesSelect BibliographyIndex

This book explores the paradox that the Gothic (today's werewolves, vampires, and horror movies) owe their origins (and their legitimacy) to eighteenth-century interpretations of Shakespeare.

Stephen King is the world's best-selling horror writer. His work is ubiquitous on bookstore, supermarket, and personal library shelves and has been faithfully adapted into some of the most iconic horror films of the twentieth century. This study explores his writing through the lenses of contemporary literary and cultural theory. Through analyses of some of his best-known work, including "e;Carrie"e; and "e;Misery,"e; the authors argue that King offers ways of encountering and understanding some of our deepest fears about life and death, the past and the future, technological change, other people, monsters, ghosts, and the supernatural.This is the first extended critical-theoretical engagement with King's writing, and will be of interest to students, academics, and fans of horror fiction.

Gothic Contemporaries: The Haunted Text is the first of its kind to align selected 21st century fiction with a revised understanding of the gothic through themes such as signification, communication, ethics, inheritance and currency.