Expanding the Gothic Canon: Studies in Literature, Film and New Media

Description

This volume offers a survey of analyses of Gothic texts, including literary works, feature films, a TV serial, and video games, with a view to showing the evolution and expansion of the Gothic convention across the ages and the media. The temporal scope of the book is broad: the chapters cover narratives from the early and mid-eighteenth century, predating the birth of the convention in 1764, through Romantic and Victorian novels, to the contemporary manifestations of the Gothic. Primarily designed for graduate and postgraduate students, the book sets out to acquaint them with both the convention and different theoretical approaches. The studies presented here could also prove inspirational for fellow scholars and helpful for university teachers, the book becoming an item on the reading lists in Gothic literature, film and media courses. Cover Contents Editors’ Preface CHAPTER ONE The Gothic Canon: Contexts, Features, Relationships, Perspectives Works cited CHAPTER TWO Gothic Castaways: Dreams, Demons and Monsters in Early Modern Desert Island Narratives Works cited CHAPTER THREE Ambivalence and Ambiguity in Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey Enter the (anti)heroine Bibliomania The equivocal suitor The (mock) villain Works cited CHAPTER FOUR A Christmas Carol—Charles Dickens’s Ghostly Academy The Ghost of Hamlet’s Father The Ghost of Jacob Marley The Ghost of Illumination The Ghost of Christmas Present: “A jolly Giant, glorious to see” The Final Countdown: The Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come Conclusion Works cited CHAPTER FIVE The Undead Queen: Queen Victoria’s Afterlife in Gothic Fiction Works cited CHAPTER SIX First-Person Noir: Murderousness and (Ir)rationality in Twentieth-Century Crime Fiction “A normality-challenged teenage eccentric” Murderers’ novels The gory art of murder Works cited CHAPTER SEVEN Faculty Gothic in the American College Novel of the 1990s Works cited CHAPTER EIGHT Competing Genres in the English Country House: The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters Works cited CHAPTER NINE Ghosts and Their Stories in Children’s Fiction Works cited CHAPTER TEN In the Bowels of a Gothic Microverse: Delicatessen as a Semiotic Palimpsest Works cited CHAPTER ELEVEN Gothic Automata and the Kunstkammer Island: The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes by Quay Brothers Works cited CHAPTER TWELVE The Murder House, or the Archaic Mother in American Horror Story Approaching the Bad Place Inside the Mother House The female abject, or monstrous her-stories Still life, or taming the monstrous feminine Works cited CHAPTER THIRTEEN Gothic Videogames Gothic and Videogames Gothic in Videogames Gothic as Videogames Works cited Video Games Index of Names and Titles Contributors