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Dale Townshend

This volume provides a comprehensive account of the oeuvre of Matthew Gregory Lewis (1775–1818), from his juvenilia through to his romances and shorter tales, dramas, translations, adaptations, ballads, poetry and editorial endeavours, and into his posthumously published writings on slavery. Across an extended introduction and six chapters, the argument offers fresh considerations of Lewis’s well-known Gothic works whilst also providing coverage of his more obscure published and unpublished texts. Based on extensive archival research undertaken in Britain, North America and the Caribbean, the book restores to critical focus a number of Lewis’s works that have not previously been given scholarly attention. While drawing, where relevant, upon the biographical studies of earlier critics, the study remains first and foremost a literary history, and the first closely to situate this most prolific, versatile and influential of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century British writers in relation to Gothic and Romantic literary culture more broadly.

University of Wales Press

Gothic Literary Studies

Matthew Gregory Lewis: The Gothic and Romantic Literary Culture

Robyn Ollett

Queer theory, queer literary criticism and queer cultural criticism often focus on western, white, cis men. This book provides the first in-depth analysis of contemporary queer and Gothic texts that focus on the subjectivity, characterisation and representation of queer girls and women. The New Queer Gothic applies interdisciplinary theory to offer a new mode and method of reading literary and film fiction. From monstrous femininity in tales of girlhood, to paranoid negativity and transformation in young womanhood, through to postcolonial doubles, hybrid assimilation, corporeal possession, and final girls at the end of everything – this book takes as its canon works from the past fifteen years concerning queer and questioning girls and women in Gothic settings and narratives, to elucidate upon questions of queer feminist ethics, biopower and global identity politics.

The New Queer Gothic: Reading Queer Girls and Women in Contemporary Fiction and Film

Joan Passey

This book asks why so many authors drew on Cornwall for inspiration across the long nineteenth century, and considers the seismic cultural changes in Cornwall that spurred this interest – from the collapse of the mining industry to the developing national rail network; from the birth of tourism to the neomedieval rise in interest in King Arthur. Understanding frequently overlooked Cornwall in this period is vital to understanding Gothic literature, the Victorian imagination, intellectual and creative networks, and attitudes towards regionality. The first part of the book considers landscape and legend, defining a mining Gothic tradition, exposing the shipwreck as Gothic mastertrope, and demonstrating how antiquarians drew from Cornish legends and lore. The second part explores encounters with modernity, investigating the impact of railway expansion on access to Cornwall, the development of a Cornish King Arthur as a key figure of Victorian masculinity, and the specific features of the Cornish ghost story.

Cornish Gothic, 1830-1913

Alex Bevan

Gothic tourism is a growing phenomenon and a medium through which Gothic fictions and folkloric tales are re-imagined and generated. This book examines the complex relationship between contemporary English Gothic attractions and storytelling, uncovering how works of Gothic fiction can both inspire Gothic tourism and emerge from the spaces of Gothic tourism, contending that Gothic tourist attractions are multi-layered storytelling experiences. Contributing to the study of literature and place, Gothic Literary Travel and Tourism draws together the study of literary Gothic tourism and spatial philosophy, offering interdisciplinary analysis into the interface between Gothic narrative(s) and the spaces in which the tourist navigates. The storytelling practices taking place in Gothic caves, theme parks, ghost tours and rural walks serve to reflect contemporary fears and anxieties. This book situates the act of touring a Gothic site as a process of literary and social discovery.

Gothic Literary Travel and Tourism

Penny Dreadfuls and the Gothic breaks new ground in uncovering penny titles which have been hitherto largely neglected from literary discourse revealing the cultural, social and literary significance of these working-class texts. The present volume is a reappraisal of penny dreadfuls, demonstrating their cruciality in both our understanding of working-class Victorian Literature and the Gothic mode. This edited collection of essays provides new insights into the fields of Victorian literature, popular culture and Gothic fiction more broadly; it is divided into three sections, whose titles replicate the dual titles offered by penny publications during the nineteenth century. Sections one and two consist of three chapters, while section three consists of four essays, all of which intertwine to create an in-depth and intertextual exposition of Victorian society, literature, and gothic representations.

Penny Dreadfuls and the Gothic: Investigations of Pernicious Tales of Terror

Middle Eastern Gothics is the first scholarly volume on Gothic literature from the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). Its nine chapters consider literary expressions of the Gothic in the major Middle Eastern languages – Arabic, Hebrew, Persian and Turkish. Spanning the Maghreb, the Arabian Peninsula, Iraq, Iran, Turkey, Egypt and Palestine, the book makes a case for the transnational region – a cohesive geographic space encompassing diverse cultures, languages and histories that parallel, intersect or overlap – as a crucial locus of Gothic Studies, alongside the nation, the globe or the hyper-local. Across the MENA region, the Gothic helps express ongoing literary negotiations with modernity, leaving its distinctive mark on representations of globalisation, colonialism and nationalism. At the same time, Middle Eastern literary texts expand the boundaries of the mode on their own terms, refracting broad histories through local and indigenous forms, figures and narratives that we might associate with the Gothic.

Middle Eastern Gothics: Literature, Spectral Modernities and the Restless Past

Jonathan Rayner

The term ‘Gothic’ has been applied to examples of Australian cinema since the 1970s, often in arbitrary and divergent ways. This book examines a wide range of Australian films to trace their Gothic resemblances, characteristics and meanings. By concentrating on the occurrence of Gothic motifs, characters, landscapes and narratives, it argues for the recognition and relevance of a coherent Gothic heritage in Australian film. A plethora of Gothic representatives are considered in relation to four consistent and illuminating continuities (images of the family, ideas of monstrosity, generic hybridity and the occurrence of the sublime), and this study debates the appearance and asserts the significance of Australian Gothic films within their national, cultural, literary and cinematic traditions.

Australian Gothic: A Cinema of Horrors

Suzanne Manizza Roszak

A literary study of childhood in the American Gothic.
 
Childhood in Gothic literature has often served colonialist, white supremacist, and patriarchal ideologies, but in Uncanny Youth, Suzanne Manizza Roszak highlights hemispheric American writers who subvert these scripts. In the hands of authors ranging from Octavio Paz and Maryse Condé to N. Scott Momaday and Tracey Baptiste, Gothic conventions critique systems of power in the Americas. As fictional children confront shifting configurations of imperialism and patterns of gendered, anti-queer violence, their uncanny stories call on readers to reckon with intersecting forms of injustice.

Uncanny Youth: Childhood, the Gothic, and the Literary Americas

James Morgart

Prior studies of post-war American Gothic literature (and even American horror films) have primarily interpreted Gothic cultural production of the post-war period through a Cold War lens. Despite legitimate reasons for such an approach, this emphasis has limited inquiries into post-war fiction as well as our understanding of the nation’s complicated identity. While the federal government and its investigative agencies may have been preoccupied with the so-called ‘red menace’ that threatened to spread across the planet, each region of the country already possessed major strains of Gothic fiction that focused on regional anxieties – namely of those connected to women and minorities that threatened the region’s constructed identity and balance of power. The Haunted States of America shifts the focus to these Gothic strains by examining how the anxieties, fears and concerns illustrated in the works of several post-World War II writers can be best understood through regional history and identity.

The Haunted States of America: Gothic Regionalism in Post-war American Fiction

Laura R. Kremmel

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.

Romantic Medicine and the Gothic Imagination: Morbid Anatomies


Many books have been published on the body and the body in parts. However, very few of them tackle the relationship between literature/ the Gothic and anatomical culture in depth. Tim Marshall’s Murdering to Dissect: Graverobbing, Frankenstein and the anatomy of literature (Manchester University Press, 1995) is one of the exceptions. Recently, Ian Conrich and Laura Sedgwick’s Gothic Dissections in Film and Literature: The Body in Parts (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017) has raised interest in the issue of dissection but does not however provide close readings of Gothic texts like those proposed by Gothic Remains. Andrew Smith’s Gothic Death, 1740–1914 (Manchester University Press, 2016) deals with death/corpses and the Gothic but is less focused on the history of medicine and the part played by anatomy in medical education and practice.
