The Gothic and Death

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The gothic and death is the first ever published study to investigate how the multifarious 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 to diverse ends from the mid-eighteenth century to the present day. Drawing on recent scholarship in Gothic Studies, film theory, Women’s and Gender Studies, and Thanatology Studies, to which fields it seeks to make a valuable contribution, this interdisciplinary collection of fifteen essays by international scholars considers 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.

Author(s): Carol Margaret Davison
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Year: 2017

Language: English
Tags: Gothic Studies; Death; Thanatology Studies; Graveyard Poetry; Romantic Poetry; Victorian Literature; American Literature; Italian Literature; Russian Literature; Bollywood Film

Front matter
Contents
List of figures
List of contributors
Series editor’s preface
Acknowledgements
Introduction – the corpse in the closet: the Gothic, death, and modernity
Part I Gothic graveyards and afterlives
Past, present, and future in the Gothic graveyard
‘On the very Verge of legitimate Invention’: Charles Bonnet and William Blake’s illustrations to Robert Blair’s The Grave (1808)
Entranced by death: Horace Smith’s Mesmerism
Part II Gothic revolutions and undead histories
‘This dreadful machine’: the spectacle of death and the aesthetics of crowd control
Undying histories: Washington Irving’s Gothic afterlives
Deadly interrogations: cycles of death and transcendence in Byron’s Gothic
Part III Gothic apocalypses: dead selves/dead civilizations
The annihilation of self and species: the ecoGothic sensibilities of Mary Shelley and Nathaniel Hawthorne
Death cults in Gothic ‘Lost World’ fiction
Dead again: zombies and the spectre of cultural decline
Part IV Global Gothic dead
A double dose of death in Iginio Ugo Tarchetti’s ‘I fatali’
Through the opaque veil: the Gothic and death in Russian realism
Afterdeath and the Bollywood Gothic noir
Part V Twenty-first-century Gothic and death
Dead and ghostly children in contemporary literature for young people
Modernity’s fatal addictions: technological necromancy and E. Elias Merhige’s Shadow of the Vampire
‘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’
Index