The Gothic and Death

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.

Table of Contents:
Introduction - 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

About the Author :
Carol Margaret Davison is Professor of Women's and Gender Studies at the University of Windsor

Review :
‘The Gothic and death is an interesting and varied collection that explores many compelling cultural themes through a range of seemingly disparate texts. In doing so, the work achieves a rare unity for an edited collection – attempting perhaps the widest scope it could have, most students or scholars of the Gothic will find something of interest here. The topics of individual essays may not lend themselves immediately to the scholarship of others, but the ideas that run through the collection as a whole will likely speak far more broadly. The highest recommendation for The Gothic and death is that it lends itself to reading as a unified whole, and not merely as a collection of individual essays.’