Monstrous media/spectral subjects explores the intersection of monsters, ghosts, representation and technology in Gothic texts from the nineteenth century to the present. It argues that emerging media technologies from the phantasmagoria and magic lantern to the hand-held video camera and the personal computer both shape Gothic subjects and in turn become Gothicised.
In a collection of essays that ranges from the Victorian fiction of Wilkie Collins, Bram Stoker and Richard Marsh to the music of Tom Waits, world horror cinema and the TV series Doctor Who, this book finds fresh and innovative contexts for the study of Gothic. Combining essays by well-established and emerging scholars, it should appeal to academics and students researching both Gothic literature and culture and the cultural impact of new technologies.
Author(s): Fred Botting, Catherine Spooner
Series: International Gothic
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Year: 2015
Language: English
Pages: 175
Tags: Literary Criticism, General
Title page
Imprint
Contents
Notes on contributors
Acknowledgements
1 Introduction: monstrous media/spectral subjects
Part I Between text and image
2 Gothic wars - media’s lust: on the cultural afterlife of the war dead
3 Kingdom of shadows: fin-de-siècle gothic and early cinema
4 ‘A mirror with a memory’: the development of the negative in Victorian gothic
5 Modern phantasmagorias and visual culture in Wilkie Collins’s Basil
Part II Sounding spectres
6 ‘The earth died screaming’: Tom Waits’s Bone Machine
7 Ghosts of the Gristleized
Part III Moving media
8 ‘Nineteenth century (up-to-date) with a vengeance’: vampirism, Victorianism and collage in Guy Maddin's Dracula – Pages from a Virgin's Diary
9 Spectrality and the deconstruction of the cinema in Neil Burger’s The Illusionist and Steven Millhauser's short stories
10 Performing fabulous monsters: re-inventing the gothic personae in bizarre magick
11 Body genres, night vision and the female monster: REC and the contemporary horror film
12 You have been saved: digital memory and salvation
Index
