![]() ![]() Our book’s contribution is to show that this is not confined to a past popularly perceived as ‘historical’ but persists throughout the contemporary era right up to the most recent depictions of environmental crisis or zombie apocalypse. ![]() Gothic, with its found manuscripts and unreliable narrators, its hauntings and its uncanny returns, has always been a fictional mode peculiarly alert to the difficulties of writing history. Across twenty-three specially commissioned essays, it demonstrates that Gothic remains closely interdependent with its time, not only reflecting but also contributing to the zeitgeist that it is a mode in which some of the most pressing political and intellectual ideas of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries are registered, explored and critiqued. The Cambridge History of the Gothic Volume 3not only takes Gothic cultural products of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries seriously, following in the wake of scholars like Punter, Sage and Lloyd Smith, but also places them in the context of major historical shifts and events, from the invention of cinema and the emergence of literary Modernism to the rise of neoliberalism and the War on Terror. Lloyd Smith’s influential collection of essays, Modern Gothic: A Reader (1996). It would be another sixteen yearsīefore a book would focus solely on contemporary works, Victor Sage and Allan Thread from Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764) to Anne Rice’s Until the publication of David Punter’s The Literature of Terror inġ980, a study that established convincingly for the first time a continuous ![]() #Modern gothic literature full#It did not achieve full recognition, however, ‘contemporary’ Gothic was sometimes vaguely gestured at in critical references,įor example, to popular crime fiction or to the ‘southern Gothic’ of Williamįaulkner and some of his peers. The idea that there might be a ‘modern’ or Subsequent to these dates as a falling off from, or attenuation of, an essentially Theįirst wave of Gothic scholars who emerged from the 1920s onwards tended toĬonfine the Gothic novel to the period 1764–1820, and to see anything published Until then, Gothic scholarship focusedĪlmost entirely on the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Phenomenon dates back only as far as the 1980s. However, its serious study as a contemporary literary and cultural Gothic is firmly entrenched in the public consciousness, and its contemporary dimensions, from fashion to fiction, routinely recognised – and both celebrated and deplored – in the media. This may seem surprising – the study of Gothic literature and film is well established in the academy, and Gothic has been the subject of numerous high-profile exhibitions and cultural events in the UK in recent years, including the British Film Institute’s Gothic: The Dark Heart of Film (2013) and the British Library’s Terror and Wonder: The Gothic Imagination (2014). The blurb for our book makes the bold claim that this is the first history of Gothic in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. ![]()
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