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Literary studies: fiction, novelists & prose writers

The Gothic and death

Series edited by Elisabeth Bronfen. Edited by Carol Davison

Description

The Gothic and death offers the first ever published study devoted to the subject of the Gothic and death across the centuries. It investigates how the multifarious strands of the Gothic and the concepts of death, dying, mourning and memorialisation ('the Death Question') - have intersected and been configured cross-culturally to diverse ends from the mid-eighteenth century to the present day. Drawing on recent scholarship in such fields as Gothic Studies, film theory, Women's and Gender Studies and Thanatology Studies, this interdisciplinary collection of fifteen essays by international scholars combines an attention to socio-historical and cultural contexts with a rigorous close reading of works, both classic and lesser known. This area of enquiry is considered by way of such popular and uncanny figures as corpses, ghosts, zombies and vampires, and across various cultural and literary forms such as Graveyard Poetry, Romantic poetry, Victorian literature, nineteenth-century Italian and Russian literature, Anglo-American film and television, contemporary Young Adult fiction and Bollywood film noir.
The Gothic and death

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Endorsements

The Gothic and death is the first ever published study to investigate how the diverse strands of the Gothic and the concepts of death, dying, mourning, and memorialization - what the Editor broadly refers to as "the Death Question" - have intersected and been configured cross-culturally from the mid-eighteenth century to the present day. An interdisciplinary collection of fifteen essays by international scholars, The Gothic and death draws on recent scholarship in Gothic Studies, film theory, Women's and Gender Studies and Thanatology Studies to consider the Gothic's engagement, by way of its unique necropolitics and necropoetics, with death's challenges to all systems of meaning and its relationship to the culturally contingent concepts of memento mori, subjectivity, spectrality and corporeal transcendence. Attentive to our defamiliarization with death since the advent of enlightened modernity and the death-related anxieties engendered by that transition, The Gothic and death combines detailed attention to socio-historical and cultural contexts with rigorous close readings of artistic, literary, televisual and cinematic works. This surprisingly underexplored area of enquiry is considered by way of such popular and uncanny figures as corpses, ghosts, zombies and vampires, and across various cultural and literary forms as Graveyard Poetry, Romantic poetry, Victorian literature, nineteenth-century Italian and Russian literature, Anglo-American film and television, contemporary Young Adult fiction, Bollywood film noir, and new media technologies that complicate our ideas of mourning, haunting and the "afterlife" of the self. The collection will be of interest to all students and scholars in the fields of Gothic literature and Gothic studies.

Author Biography

Carol Margaret Davison is Professor and Head of Department of English Language, Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Windsor. Elisabeth Bronfen is Professor at the English Department of Zurich University.

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Manchester University Press

Manchester University Press

Manchester University Press is a leading UK publisher known for excellent research in the humanities and social sciences.

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Bibliographic Information

  • Publisher Manchester University Press
  • Publication Date February 2017
  • Orginal LanguageEnglish
  • ISBN/Identifier 9781784992699 / 1784992690
  • Publication Country or regionUnited Kingdom
  • FormatHardback
  • Primary Price 70 GBP
  • Pages240
  • ReadershipGeneral
  • Publish StatusPublished
  • Dimensions234 x 156 mm
  • Illustration7 black & white illustrations
  • Biblio NotesIntroduction - The corpse in the closet: the gothic, death, and modernity - Carol Margaret Davison Part I: Gothic graveyards and afterlives 1. Past, present and future death in the graveyard - Serena Trowbridge 2. On the very verge of legitimate invention': Charles Bonnet and Blake's illustrations to The Grave (1808)' - Sibylle Erle 3. Entranced by death: Horace Smith's Mesmerism - Bruce Wyse Part II: Gothic revolutions and undead histories 4. "This dreadful machine": the spectacle of death and the aesthetics of crowd control - Emma Galbally and Conrad Brunström 5. Undying histories: Washington Irving's gothic afterlives - Yael Maurer 6. Deadly interrogations: cycles of death and transcendence in Byron's gothic - Adam White Part III: Gothic apocalypses: dead selves/dead civilizations 7. The annihilation of self and Species: The ecogothic sensibilities of Mary Shelley and Nathaniel Hawthorne - Jennifer Schell 8. Death cults in gothic "lost world" fiction' - John Cameron Hartley 9. Dead again: zombies and the spectre of cultural decline - Matthew Pangborn Part IV: Global gothic dead 10. A double dose of death in Iginio Ugo Tarchetti's 'I Fatali' - Christina Petraglia 11. Through the opaque veil: the gothic and death in Russian realism - Katherine Bowers 12. Afterdeath and the Bollywood gothic noir - Vijay Mishra Part V: Twenty-first century gothic and death 13. Dead and ghostly children in contemporary literature for young people - Michelle J. Smith 14. Modernity's fatal addictions: technological necromancy and E. Elias Merhige's Shadow of the Vampire' - Carol Margaret Davison 15. 'I'm not in that thing you know ... I'm remote. I'm in the cloud': networked spectrality in Charlie Brooker's 'Be Right Back' - Neal Kirk Index
  • SeriesInternational Gothic Series

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