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Showing 1 - 20 of 38 items
By Charlaine Harris. 2011
Features the novella Small-Town Wedding, in which Sookie and her boss Sam, a shape-shifter, attend nuptials in Sam's Texas hometown.…
Includes trivia and fan questions, recipes, and a guide to Sookie's world of vampires, werewolves, and fairies. 2011By James Machin. 2018
This book is the first study of how weird fiction emerged from Victorian supernatural…
literature abandoning the more conventional Gothic horrors of the past for the contemporary weird tale It investigates the careers and fiction of a range of the British writers who inspired H P Lovecraft such as Arthur Machen M P Shiel and John Buchan to shed light on the tensions between literary and genre fiction that continue to this day Weird Fiction in Britain 1880 1939 focuses on the key literary and cultural contexts of weird fiction of the period including Decadence paganism and the occult and discusses how these later impacted on the seminal American pulp magazine Weird Tales This ground-breaking book will appeal to scholars of weird horror and Gothic fiction genre studies Decadence popular fiction the occult and Fin-de-Si cle cultural historyBy Julian Wolfreys. 2018
Haunted Selves, Haunting Places in English Literature and Culture offers a series of readings of poetry, the novel and other…
forms of art and cultural expression, to explore the relationship between subject and landscape, self and place. Utilizing an interdisciplinary approach grounded in close reading, the text places Jacques Derrida’s work on spectrality in dialogue with particular aspects of phenomenology. The volume explores writing and culture from the 1880s to the present day, proceeding through four sections examining related questions of identity, memory, the landscape, and our modern relationship to the past. Julian Wolfreys presents a theoretically informed understanding of the efficacy of literature and culture in connecting us to the past in an affective and engaged manner.By Sean Moreland. 2018
This collection of essays examines the legacy of H.P. Lovecraft’s most important critical work, Supernatural Horror in Literature. Each chapter…
illuminates a crucial aspect of Lovecraft’s criticism, from its aesthetic, philosophical and literary sources, to its psychobiological underpinnings, to its pervasive influence on the conception and course of horror and weird literature through the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. These essays investigate the meaning of cosmic horror before and after Lovecraft, explore his critical relevance to contemporary social science, feminist and queer readings of his work, and ultimately reveal Lovecraft’s importance for contemporary speculative philosophy, film and literature.By Jeffrey Weinstock. 2018
With well over one-hundred episodes, the podcast Welcome to Night Vale has spawned several international live tours, two novels set…
in the Night Vale universe, and an extensive volume of fan fiction and commentary. However, despite its immense popularity, Welcome to Night Vale has received almost no academic scrutiny. This edited collection of scholarly essays—the very first of its kind on a podcast—attempts to redress this lack of attention to Night Vale by bringing together an international group of scholars from different disciplines to consider the program’s form, themes, politics, and fanbase. After a thorough introduction by the volume’s editor, Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock, the eight contributors not only offer close analysis of Night Vale, but use the program as the impetus for broader explorations of new media, gender, the constitution of identity, the construction of place, and the human relationship to meaning and the non-human.By Kevin Corstorphine, Laura R. Kremmel. 2018
This handbook examines the use of horror in storytelling, from oral traditions through folklore and fairy tales to contemporary horror…
fiction. Divided into sections that explore the origins and evolution of horror fiction, the recurrent themes that can be seen in horror, and ways of understanding horror through literary and cultural theory, the text analyses why horror is so compelling, and how we should interpret its presence in literature. Chapters explore historical horror aspects including ancient mythology, medieval writing, drama, chapbooks, the Gothic novel, and literary Modernism and trace themes such as vampires, children and animals in horror, deep dark forests, labyrinths, disability, and imperialism. Considering horror via postmodern theory, evolutionary psychology, postcolonial theory, and New Materialism, this handbook investigates issues of gender and sexuality, race, censorship and morality, environmental studies, and literary versus popular fiction.This book investigates the relationship between the fascinating and misunderstood penny blood, early Victorian popular fiction for the working class,…
and Victorian anatomy. In 1832, the controversial Anatomy Act sanctioned the use of the body of the pauper for teaching dissection to medical students, deeply affecting the Victorian poor. The ensuing decade, such famous penny bloods as Manuscripts from the Diary of a Physician, Varney the Vampyre, Sweeney Todd, and The Mysteries of London addressed issues of medical ethics, social power, and bodily agency. Challenging traditional views of penny bloods as a lowlier, un-readable genre, this book rereads these four narratives in the light of the 1832 Anatomy Act, putting them in dialogue with different popular artistic forms and literary genres, as well as with the spaces of death and dissection in Victorian London, exploring their role as channels for circulating discourses about anatomy and ethics among the Victorian poor.By Victoria Margree. 2019
This book explores women’s short supernatural fiction between the emergence of first wave feminism and the post-suffrage period, arguing that…
while literary ghosts enabled an interrogation of women’s changing circumstances, ghosts could have both subversive and conservative implications. Haunted house narratives by Charlotte Riddell and Margaret Oliphant become troubled by uncanny reminders of the origins of middle-class wealth in domestic and foreign exploitation. Corpse-like revenants are deployed in Female Gothic tales by Mary Elizabeth Braddon and Edith Nesbit to interrogate masculine aestheticisation of female death. In the culturally-hybrid supernaturalism of Alice Perrin, the ‘Marriage Question’ migrates to colonial India, and psychoanalytically-informed stories by May Sinclair, Eleanor Scott and Violet Hunt explore just how far gender relations have really progressed in the post-First World War period. Study of the woman’s short story productively problematises literary histories about the “golden age” of the ghost story, and about the transition from Victorianism to modernism.By Ashlee Joyce. 2019
This book examines the intersection of trauma and the Gothic in six contemporary British novels: Martin Amis’s London Fields, Margaret…
Drabble’s The Gates of Ivory, Ian McEwan’s Atonement, Pat Barker’s Regeneration and Double Vision, and Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go. In these works, the Gothic functions both as an expression of societal violence at the turn of the twenty-first century and as a response to the related crisis of representation brought about by the contemporary individual’s highly mediated and spectatorial relationship to this violence. By locating these six novels within the Gothic tradition, this work argues that each text, to borrow a term from Jacques Derrida, “participates” in the Gothic in ways that both uphold the paradigm of “unspeakability” that has come to dominate much trauma fiction, as well as push its boundaries to complicate how we think of the ethical relationship between witnessing and writing trauma.By Brenda Ayres, Sarah E. Maier. 2020
Neo-Victorian Madness: Rediagnosing Nineteenth-Century Mental Illness in Literature and Other Media investigates contemporary fiction, cinema and television shows set in…
the Victorian period that depict mad murderers, lunatic doctors, social dis/ease and madhouses as if many Victorians were “mad.” Such portraits demand a “rediagnosing” of mental illness that was often reduced to only female hysteria or a general malaise in nineteenth-century renditions. This collection of essays explores questions of neo-Victorian representations of moral insanity, mental illness, disturbed psyches or non-normative imaginings as well as considers the important issues of legal righteousness, social responsibility or methods of restraint and corrupt incarcerations. The chapters investigate the self-conscious re-visions, legacies and lessons of nineteenth-century discourses of madness and/or those persons presumed mad rediagnosed by present-day (neo-Victorian) representations informed by post-nineteenth-century psychological insights.By Clive Bloom. 2020
“Simply put, there is absolutely nothing on the market with the range of ambition of this strikingly eclectic collection of…
essays. Not only is it impossible to imagine a more comprehensive view of the subject, most readers – even specialists in the subject – will find that there are elements of the Gothic genre here of which they were previously unaware.” - Barry Forshaw, Author of British Gothic Cinema and Sex and Film The Palgrave Handbook of Contemporary Gothic is the most comprehensive compendium of analytic essays on the modern Gothic now available, covering the vast and highly significant period from 1918 to 2019. The Gothic sensibility, over 200 years old, embraces its dark past whilst anticipating the future. From demons and monsters to post- apocalyptic fears and ecological fantasies, Gothic is thriving as never before in the arts and in popular culture. This volume is made up of 62 comprehensive chapters with notes and extended bibliographies contributed by scholars from around the world. The chapters are written not only for those engaged in academic research but also to be accessible to students and dedicated followers of the genre. Each chapter is packed with analysis of the Gothic in both theory and practice, as the genre has mutated and spread over the last hundred years. Starting in 1918 with the impact of film on the genre's development, and moving through its many and varied international incarnations, each chapter chronicles the history of the gothic milieu from the movies to gaming platforms and internet memes, television and theatre. The volume also looks at how Gothic intersects with fashion, music and popular culture: a multi-layered, multi-ethnic, even a trans-gendered experience as we move into the twenty first century.By Ruth Heholt, Holly-Gale Millette. 2020
This collection explores global dystopic, grotesque and retold narratives of degeneration, ecological and economic ruin, dystopia, and inequality in contemporary…
fictions set in the urban space. Divided into three sections—Identities and Histories, Ruin and Residue, and Global Gothic—The New Urban Gothic explores our anxieties and preoccupation with social inequalities, precarity and the peripheral that are found in so many new fictions across various media. Focusing on non-canonical Gothic global cities, this distinctive collection discusses urban centres in England’s Black Country, Moscow, Detroit, Seoul, Hong Kong, Bangkok, Singapore, Dehli, Srinigar, Shanghai and Barcelona as well as cities of the imaginary, the digital and the animated. This book will appeal to anyone interested in the intersections of time, place, space and media in contemporary Gothic Studies. The New Urban Gothic casts reflections and shadows on the age of the Anthropocene.By Monika Elbert, Rita Bode. 2021
American Women’s Regionalist Fiction: Mapping the Gothic seeks to redress the monolithic vision of American Gothic by analyzing the various sectional…
or regional attempts to Gothicize what is most claustrophobic or peculiar about local history. Since women writers were often relegated to inferior status, it is especially compelling to look at women from the Gothic perspective. The regionalist Gothic develops along the line of difference and not unity—thus emphasizing regional peculiarities or a sense of superiority in terms of regional history, natural landscapes, immigrant customs, folk tales, or idiosyncratic ways. The essays study the uncanny or the haunting quality of “the commonplace,” as Hawthorne would have it in his introduction to The House of the Seven Gables, in regionalist Gothic fiction by a wide range of women writers between ca. 1850 and 1930. This collection seeks to examine how/if the regionalist perspective is small, limited, and stultifying and leads to Gothic moments, or whether the intersection between local and national leads to a clash that is jarring and Gothic in nature.By Clive Bloom. 2021
By the early 1830s the old school of Gothic literature was exhausted. Late Romanticism, emphasising as it did the uncertainties…
of personality and imagination, gave it a new lease of life. Gothic—the literature of disturbance and uncertainty—now produced works that reflected domestic fears, sexual crimes, drug filled hallucinations, the terrible secrets of middle class marriage, imperial horror at alien invasion, occult demonism and the insanity of psychopaths. It was from the 1830s onwards that the old gothic castle gave way to the country house drawing room, the dungeon was displaced by the sewers of the city and the villains of early novels became the familiar figures of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Dracula, Dorian Grey and Jack the Ripper. After the death of Prince Albert (1861), the Gothic became darker, more morbid, obsessed with demonic lovers, blood sucking ghouls, blood stained murderers and deranged doctors. Whilst the gothic architecture of the Houses of Parliament and the new Puginesque churches upheld a Victorian ideal of sobriety, Christianity and imperial destiny, Gothic literature filed these new spaces with a dread that spread like a plague to America, France, Germany and even Russia. From 1830 to 1914, the period covered by this volume, we saw the emergence of the greats of Gothic literature and the supernatural from Edgar Allan Poe to Emily Bronte, from Sheridan Le Fanu to Bram Stoker and Robert Louis Stevenson. Contributors also examine the fin-de-siècle dreamers of decadence such as Arthur Machen, M P Shiel and Vernon Lee and their obsession with the occult, folklore, spiritualism, revenants, ghostly apparitions and cosmic annihilation. This volume explores the period through the prism of architectural history, urban studies, feminism, 'hauntology' and much more. 'Horror', as Poe teaches us, 'is the soul of the plot'.By Diana Pérez Edelman. 2021
This book argues that embryology and the reproductive sciences played a key role in the rise of the Gothic novel…
in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Diana Pérez Edelman dissects Horace Walpole’s use of embryological concepts in the development of his Gothic imagination and provides an overview of the conflict between preformation and epigenesis in the scientific community. The book then explores the ways in which Gothic literature can be read as epigenetic in its focus on internally sourced modes of identity, monstrosity, and endless narration. The chapters analyze Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto; Ann Radcliffe’s A Sicilian Romance, The Italian, and The Mysteries of Udolpho; Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; Charles Robert Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer; and James Hogg’s Confessions of a Justified Sinner, arguing that these touchstones of the Gothic register why the Gothic emerged at that time and why it continues today: the mysteries of reproduction remain unsolved.By Nizar Zouidi. 2021
Performativity of Villainy and Evil in Anglophone Literature and Media studies the performative nature of evil characters, acts and emotions…
across intersecting genres, disciplines and historical eras. This collection brings together scholars and artists with different institutional standings, cultural backgrounds and (inter)disciplinary interests with the aim of energizing the ongoing discussion of the generic and thematic issues related to the representation of villainy and evil in literature and media. The volume covers medieval literature to contemporary literature and also examines important aspects of evil in literature such as social and political identity, the gothic and systemic evil practices. In addition to literature, the book considers examples of villainy in film, TV and media, revealing that performance, performative control and maneuverability are the common characteristics of villains across the different literary and filmic genres and eras studied in the volume.By Sladja Blazan. 2021
This volume is a study of human entanglements with Nature as seen through the mode of haunting. As an interruption…
of the present by the past, haunting can express contemporary anxieties concerning our involvement in the transformation of natural environments and their ecosystems, and our complicity in their collapse. It can also express a much-needed sense of continuity and relationality. The complexity of the question—who and what gets to be called human with respect to the nonhuman—is reflected in these collected chapters, which, in their analysis of cinematic and literary representations of sentient Nature within the traditional gothic trope of haunting, bring together history, race, postcolonialism, and feminism with ecocriticism and media studies. Given the growing demand for narratives expressing our troubled relationship with Nature, it is imperative to analyze this contested ground.By Brenda Ayres, Sarah E. Maier. 2021
A Vindication of the Redhead investigates red hair in literature, art, television, and film throughout Eastern and Western cultures. This…
study examines red hair as a signifier, perpetuated through stereotypes, myths, legends, and literary and visual representations. Brenda Ayres and Sarah E. Maier provide a history of attitudes held by hegemonic populations toward red-haired individuals, groups, and genders from antiquity to the present. Ayres and Maier explore such diverse topics as Judeo-Christian narratives of red hair, redheads in Pre-Raphaelite paintings, red hair and gender identity, famous literary redheads such as Anne of Green Gables and Pippi Longstocking, contemporary and Neo-Victorian representations of redheads from the Black Widow to The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, and more. This book illuminates the symbolic significance and related ideologies of red hair constructed in mythic, religious, literary, and visual cultural discourse.By Michael Cisco. 2021
Weird Fiction: A Genre Study presents a comprehensive, contemporary analysis of the genre of weird fiction by identifying the concepts…
that influence and produce it. Focusing on the sources of narrative content—how the content is produced and what makes something weird—Michael Cisco engages with theories from Deleuze and Guattari to explain how genres work and to understand the relationship between identity and the ordinary. Cisco also uses these theories to examine the supernatural not merely as a horde of tropes, but as a recognition of the infinity of experience in defiance of limiting norms. The book also traces the sociopolitical implications of weird fiction, studying the differentiation of major and minor literatures. Through an articulated theoretical model and close textual analysis, readers will learn not only what weird fiction is, but how and why it is produced.This book provides a comprehensive reading of a space/place-based experience from the birth of the American horror genre (nineteenth century…
American Romanticism) to its rise and evolution in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Exploring a series of narratives, this study focuses on the role of space and place as key elements for successful articulation of horror. The analysis, therefore, employs different theoretical premises and concepts belonging to human geography, which, while being part of the larger discipline of geography, predominantly directs its attention towards the presence and activities of humans. By connecting such theoretical readings with the continuously evolving American horror genre, this book offers a unique insight into the academically unexplored trans-disciplinary spatially based reading of the genre.