This book provides a theoretically informed account of Gothic Hauntology. It is distinctive foremost in two ways. It shows hauntology at work in modern as well as older gothic narratives and it has a unique focus on everyday gothic as well as everyday hauntology. The chapters perform a historical circle going from Munro to Poe and then back again, offering novel readings of works by well-known authors that are contextualized under the umbrella of the theme. Anchored in a well-known topic and genre, but with a specific phenomenological framework, this book will be of interest to both students and more advanced scholars.

Gothic Music - The Sounds of the Uncanny traces sonic Gothic through history and genres from the eighteenth-century ghost story through the spooky soundtracks of cinema, television and video games to the dark music of the Goth subculture.

The essays in this volume reinterpret and contest the Gothic cultural inheritance, each from a specifically twenty-first century perspective. Most are based on papers delivered at a conference held, appropriately, in Horace Walpoleʼs Gothic mansion at Strawberry Hill in West London, which is usually seen as the geographical origin of the first, but not the last, of the many Gothic revivals of the past 300 years. In a contemporary context, the Gothic sensibility could be seen as a mode particularly applicable to the frightening instability of the world in which we find ourselves at the beginning of the twenty-first century. The truth is probably less epochal: that Gothic never went away (when were we ever without fear?), or at least has persisted since its resurgence in the late nineteenth century. Gothic is at least as modern as it is ancient, and each essay in this collection contributes to current scholarship on the Gothic by exploring a particular aspect of Gothic’s contemporaneity. The volume contains papers on horror novels and cinema, poetry, popular music and fan cultures.

This volume, a collection with contributions from some of the major scholars of the Gothic in literature and culture, reflects on how recent Gothic studies have foregrounded a plethora of technologies associated with Gothic literary and cultural production. The engaging essays look into the links between technologies and the proliferation of the Gothic seen in an excess of Gothic texts and tropes: Frankensteinesque experiments, the manufacture of synthetic (true?) blood, Moreauesque hybrids, the power of the Borg, Dr Jekyll’s chemical experimentations, the machinery of Steampunk, or the corporeal modifications of Edward Scissorhands. Further, they explore how techno-science has contributed to the proliferation of the Gothic: Gothic in social media, digital technologies, the on-line gaming and virtual Goth/ic communities, the special effects of Gothic-horror cinema. Contributors address how Gothic technologies have, in a general sense, produced and perpetuated ideologies and influenced the politics of cultural practice, asking significant questions: How has the technology of the Gothic contributed to the writing of self and other? How have Gothic technologies been gendered, sexualized, encrypted, coded or de-coded? How has the Gothic manifested itself in new technologies across diverse geographical locations? This volume explores how Gothic technologies textualize identities and construct communities within a complex network of power relations in local, national, transnational, and global contexts. It will be of interest to scholars of the literary Gothic, extending beyond to include fascinating interventions into the areas of cultural studies, popular culture, science fiction, film, and TV.

A study of London suburban-set writing, exploring the links between place and fiction. This book charts a picture of evolving themes and concerns around the legibility and meaning of habitat and home for the individual, and the serious challenges that suburbia sets for literature.

Doubles and Hybrids in Latin American Gothic focuses on a recurrent motif that is fundamental in the Gothic—the double. This volume explores how this ancient notion acquires tremendous force in a region, Latin America, which is itself defined by duplicity (indigenous/European, autochthonous religions/Catholic). Despite this duplicity and at the same time because of it, this region has also generated "mestizaje," or forms resulting from racial mixing and hybridity. This collection, then, aims to contribute to the current discussion about the Gothic in Latin America by examining the doubles and hybrid forms that result from the violent yet culturally fertile process of colonization that took place in the area.

What is buried in the crypts of the Gothic? Building on psychoanalytic research on haunting, cryptonymy and melancholy, as well as on French philosophies of language, this book explores how haunting is not just a Gothic narrative device but the symptom of an impossibility of representation and of an irreparable loss at the heart of language.

The Gothic has always been interested in strange utterances and unsettling voices – from half-heard ghostly murmurings and the admonitions of the dead, to the terrible cries of the monstrous nonhuman. Gothic Utterance is the first book-length study of the role played by such voices in the Gothic tradition, exploring their prominence and importance in the American literature produced between the Revolutionary War and the close of the nineteenth century. The book argues that the American Gothic foregrounds the overpowering affect and distressing significations of the voices of the dead, dying, abjected, marginalised or nonhuman, in order to undertake a sustained interrogation of what it means to be and speak as an American in this period. The American Gothic imagines new forms of relation between speaking subjects, positing more inclusive and expansive kinds of community, while also emphasising the ethical demands attending our encounters with Gothic voices. The Gothic suggests that how we choose to hear and respond to these voices says much about our relationship with the world around us, its inhabitants – dead or otherwise – and the limits of our own subjectivity and empathy.

In demonstrating the global reach of Gothic literatures, this collection takes up the influence of the Gothic mode in literatures that may be geographically remote from one another but still share related issues of minor languages, nation building, place and race. Suggesting that there is a parallel between certain motifs and themes found in the Gothic of the North (Scandinavia, Northern Europe and Canada) and South (Australia, South Africa and the US South), the essays explore the transgressions and confusion of borders and limits, whether they be linguistic, literary, generic, class-based, gendered or sexual. The volume includes essays on a wide diversity of authors and topics: Jan Potocki, Gustav Meyrink, William Godwin, Alan Hollinghurst, Marlene van Niekerk, John Richardson, antislavery discourse and the Gothic imagination, the Australian aboriginal Gothic, vampires of Post-Soviet Gothic society, Danish, Swedish and Finnish fiction and film, and the Canadian female Gothic and the death drive. What distinguishes this book from other collections on the Gothic is the coverage of themes and literatures that are either lacking in the mainstream research on the Gothic or are referred to only briefly in other book-length studies. Experts in the Gothic and those new to the field will appreciate the book's commitment to situating Gothic sensibilities in an international context.

In Gothic Queer Culture, Laura Westengard proposes that contemporary U.S. queer culture is gothic at its core. Using interdisciplinary cultural studies to examine the gothicism in queer art, literature, and thought—including ghosts embedded in queer theory, shadowy crypts in lesbian pulp fiction, monstrosity and cannibalism in AIDS poetry, and sadomasochism in queer performance—Westengard argues that during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries a queer culture has emerged that challenges and responds to traumatic marginalization by creating a distinctly gothic aesthetic. Gothic Queer Culture examines the material effects of marginalization, exclusion, and violence and explains why discourse around the complexities of genders and sexualities repeatedly returns to the gothic. Westengard places this queer knowledge production within a larger framework of gothic queer culture, which inherently includes theoretical texts, art, literature, performance, and popular culture. By analyzing queer knowledge production alongside other forms of queer culture, Gothic Queer Culture enters into the most current conversations on the state of gender and sexuality, especially debates surrounding negativity, anti-relationalism, assimilation, and neoliberalism. It provides a framework for understanding these debates in the context of a distinctly gothic cultural mode that acknowledges violence and insidious trauma, depathologizes the association between trauma and queerness, and offers a rich counterhegemonic cultural aesthetic through the circulation of gothic tropes.