Gothic (The New Critical Idiom)
by Fred Botting
from Routledge
Gothic offers a lucid and accessible introduction to the Gothic genre, tracing the darkly terrific shapes and developments of a transgressive literary practice which has thrived for over two centuries. Fred Botting explores a number of key texts, their origins and writers, and discusses them in the context of their cultural and historical location, their critical reception and their influence.
Botting's concise introduction examines a remarkably wide and diverse range of authors and critics, varying from such artists as Mary Shelley and Bram Stoker to Angela Carter and David Lynch. Gothic focuses on the various styles and forms of the genre and analyzes the cultural significance of its prevalent figures--the ghosts, monsters, vampires, doubles and horrors that are its definitive features. Botting traces its history from its origins in the 18th century through its modernist and postmodernist representations, highlighting the ways Gothic figures have continued to shadow the progress of modernity, always displaying the underside of human values. He offers a broad overview of the themes, images and effects that not only define the genre, but also endure and re-appear endlessly in both "high" and "popular" literature and culture.
Making Monstrous: Frankenstein, Criticism, Theory
Frankenstein (New Casebooks)
from Palgrave Macmillan
Gothic: Critical Concepts in Literary and Cultural Studies
This collection brings together key writings which convey the breadth of what is understood to be Gothic, and the ways in which it has produced, reinforced, and undermined received ideas about literature and culture. In addition to its interests in the late eighteenth-century origins of the form, this collection anthologizes path-breaking essays on most aspects of gothic production, including some of its nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first century manifestations across a broad range of cultural media.
Limits of Horror: Technology, Bodies, Gothic
by Fred Botting
from Manchester University Press
Horror isn’t what it used to be. Nor are its Gothic avatars.
The meaning of monsters, vampires and ghosts has changed significantly over the last two hundred years, as have the mechanisms (from fiction to fantasmagoria, film and video games) through which they are produced and consumed. Limits of Horror, moving from gothic to cybergothic, through technological modernity and across a range of literary, cinematic and popular cultural texts, critically examines these changes and the questions they pose for understanding contemporary culture and subjectivity.
Re-examining key concepts such as the uncanny, the sublime, terror, shock and abjection in terms of their bodily and technological implications, this book advances current critical and theoretical debates on Gothic horror to propose a new theory of cultural production based on an extensive discussion of Freud’s idea of the death drive.
Limits of Horror will appeal to students and academics in Literature, Film, Media and Cultural Studies and Cultural Theory.+++
