Alan Moore and the Gothic Tradition

Description

Alan Moore's extensive interventions in the Gothic continue to enrich the genre and demonstrate his immersion within a tradition stretching back to the social and cultural upheavals of eighteenth-century Britain. Including detailed analyses of texts from across Moore's oeuvre, this volume presents the first collection of scholarly essays to encompass his work in comics, performance, poetry and prose. These essays identify the Gothic tradition as perhaps the most significant cultural context for understanding texts dealing explicitly with terror and horror (V for Vendetta, Swamp Thing, From Hell and Neonomicon) and works expressing Moore's interests in magic and psychogeography (From Hell and A Disease of Language). Moreover, core elements from Gothic aesthetics are evident in the structure and atmosphere of works ranging from Watchmen to A Small Killing, while the abject and the uncanny are fundamental in appreciating Moore's critique of the superhero and the interrogation of identity in Miracleman and his Superman stories. The socio-political dimensions of Moore's work are brought into fresh focus through an appreciation of the Gothic's capacity to encompass both the sublime and the ridiculous (The Bojeffries Saga), as well as the genre's propensity for adaptation (The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen). The first book-length study to address Moore's significance to the Gothic, this collection will be of considerable interest to scholars, students and general readers interested in the genre. Moreover, by mapping various lines of artistic and intellectual inheritance, this collection also offers fresh insight into intertextual links relevant to the study of comics, literature and adaptation. ALAN MOORE AND THE GOTHIC TRADITION Half Title Page Title Page Copyright Contents List of illustrations A note on references and quotations Notes on contributors Preface Acknowledgements Part I: Monstrous politics 1. Alan Moore and the Gothic tradition: Matthew J.A. Green 2. ‘Soap opera of the paranormal’: surreal Englishness and postimperial Gothic in The Bojeffries Saga: Tony Venezia 3. A Gothic politics: Alan Moore’s Swamp Thing and radical ecology: Maggie Gray Part II: Gothic tropes 4. ‘Is that you, our Jack?’: an anatomy of Alan Moore’s doubling strategies: Jochen Ecke 5. ‘Nothing ever ends’: facing the apocalypse in Watchmen: Christian W. Schneider 6. Gothic liminality in in V for Vendetta: Markus Oppolzer Part III: Inheritance and adaptation 7. ‘The Sleep of Reason’: Swamp Thing and the intertextual reader: Michael Bradshaw 8. Madness and the city: the collapse of reason and sanity in Alan Moore’s From Hell: Monica Germanà 9. ‘I fashioned a prison that you could not leave’: the Gothic imperative in The Castle of Otranto and ‘For the Man Who Has Everything’: Brad Ricca 10. Radical coterie and the idea of sole survival in St Leon, Frankenstein and Watchmen: Claire Sheridan 11. Reincarnating Mina Murray: subverting the Gothic heroine?: Laura Hilton Part IV: Art, magic, sex, other 12. ‘These are not our promised resurrections’: unearthing the uncanny in Alan Moore’s A Small Killing, From Hell and A Disease of Language: Christopher Murray 13. Medium, spirits and embodiment in Voice of the Fire: Julia Round 14. A darker magic: heterocosms and bricolage in Moore’s recent reworkings of Lovecraft: Matthew J.A. Green Bibliography Index