Screening the Gothic in Australia and New Zealand: Contemporary Antipodean Film and Television(2 Horror and Gothic Media Cultures)

The persistent popularity of the detective narrative, new obsessions with psychological and supernatural disturbances, as well as the resurgence of older narratives of mystery or the Gothic all constitute a vast proportion of contemporary film and television productions. New ways of watching film and television have also seen a reinvigoration of this ‘most domestic of media’. But what does this ‘domesticity’ of genre and media look like ‘Down Under’ in the twenty.first century? This collection traces representations of the Gothic on both the small and large screens in Australia and New Zealand in the twenty.first century. It attends to the development and mutation of the Gothic in these post. or neo.colonial contexts, concentrating on the generic innovations of this temporal and geographical focus.

Table of Contents:
Introduction Please Check the Signal: Screening the Gothic in the Upside Down (Jessica Gildersleeve and Kate Cantrell) Part I: Gothic Places Chapter 1 Unsettled Waters: The Postcolonial Gothic of Tidelands (Emma Doolan) Chapter 2 ‘When I Died, I Saw the Whole World’: Uncanny Space and the Maori ‘Gothic’ in the Aftermath Narratives of Waru and Maui’s Hook (Emily Holland) Chapter 3 The Kettering Incident: From Tasmanian Gothic to Antarctic Gothic (Billy Stevenson) Chapter 4 ‘Going Home is One Thing This Lot of Blockheads Can’t Do’: Unhomely Renovations on The Block (Ella Jeffery) Part II: Gothic Genres Chapter 5 Glocalizing the Gothic in Twenty-First-Century Australian Horror (Jessica Balanzategui) Chapter 6 Terra Somnambulism: Sleepwalking, Nightdreams, and Nocturnal Wanderings in the Televisual Australian Gothic (Kate Cantrell) Chapter 7 Gothic Explorations of Landscapes, Spaces, and Bodies in Jane Campion’s Top of the Lake and Top of the Lake: China Girl (Liz Shek-Noble) Chapter 8 At the End of the World: Animals, Extinction, and Death in Australian Twenty-First-Century Ecogothic Cinema (Patrick West and Luke C. Jackson) Part III: Gothic Monsters Chapter 9 Dead, and Into the World: Localness, Culture, and Domesticity in New Zealand’s What We Do in the Shadows (Lorna Piatti-Farnell) Chapter 10 Mapping Settler Gothic: Noir and the Shameful Histories of the Pakeha Middle Class in The Bad Seed (Jennifer Lawn) Chapter 11 Monstrous Victims: Women, Trauma, and Gothic Violence in Jennifer Kent’s The Babadook and The Nightingale (Jessica Gildersleeve, Amanda Howell, and Nike Sulway) Chapter 12 From ‘Fixer’ to ‘Freak’: Disabling the Ambitious (Mad)Woman in Wentworth>/cite> (Corrine E. Hinton)

About the Author :
Jessica Gildersleeve is Associate Professor of English Literature at the University of Southern Queensland. She is the author and editor of several books, including Christos Tsiolkas: The Utopian Vision (Cambria 2017), Don’t Look Now (Auteur 2017), and The Routledge Companion to Australian Literature (Routledge 2021). Kate Cantrell is a Lecturer in Writing, Editing, and Publishing at the University of Southern Queensland. Her research interests include narrative accounts of illness, immobility, and displacement. Her short stories, essays, and poems have appeared in Overland, Meanjin, and Westerly, and she writes regularly for Times Higher Education.