War Gothic In Literature And Culture

Download or read book War Gothic in Literature and Culture written by Steffen Hantke and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-12-07 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the context of the current explosion of interest in Gothic literature and popular culture, this interdisciplinary collection of essays explores for the first time the rich and long-standing relationship between war and the Gothic. Critics have described the global Seven Year’s War as the "crucible" from which the Gothic genre emerged in the eighteenth century. Since then, the Gothic has been a privileged mode for representing violence and extreme emotions and situations. Covering the period from the American Civil War to the War on Terror, this collection examines how the Gothic has provided writers an indispensable toolbox for narrating, critiquing, and representing real and fictional wars. The book also sheds light on the overlap and complicity between Gothic aesthetics and certain aspects of military experience, including the bodily violation and mental dissolution of combat, the dehumanization of "others," psychic numbing, masculinity in crisis, and the subjective experience of trauma and memory. Engaging with popular forms such as young adult literature, gaming, and comic books, as well as literature, film, and visual art, War Gothic provides an important and timely overview of war-themed Gothic art and narrative by respected experts in the field of Gothic Studies. This book makes important contributions to the fields of Gothic Literature, War Literature, Popular Culture, American Studies, and Film, Television & Media.

Download or read book Urban Gothic of the Second World War written by S. Wasson and published by Springer. This book was released on 2015-12-04 with total page 222 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines writing in the Gothic mode which subverts the dominant national narrative of the British home front. Instead of seeing wartime experience as a site of fellowship and emotional resilience, Elizabeth Bowen, Anna Kavan, Mervyn Peake, Roy Fuller and others depict shadowy figures on the margin of the nation.

Download or read book Evangelical Gothic written by Christopher Herbert and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2019-11-22 with total page 377 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Evangelical Gothic explores the bitter antagonism that prevailed between two defining institutions of nineteenth-century Britain: Evangelicalism and the popular novel. Christopher Herbert begins by retrieving from near oblivion a rich anti-Evangelical polemical literature in which the great religious revival, often lauded in later scholarship as a "moral revolution," is depicted as an evil conspiracy centered on the attempted dismantling of the humanitarian moral culture of the nation. Examining foundational Evangelical writings by John Wesley and William Wilberforce alongside novels by Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Bram Stoker, and others, Herbert contends that the realistic popular novel of the time was constitutionally alien to Evangelical ideology and even, to some extent, took its opposition to that ideology as its core function. This provocative argument illuminates the frequent linkage of Evangelicalism in nineteenth-century fiction with the characteristic imagery of the Gothic–with black magic, with themes of demonic visitation and vampirism, and with a distinctive mood of hysteria and panic.

Download or read book Gothic Invasions written by Ailise Bulfin and published by University of Wales Press. This book was released on 2018-03-28 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What do tales of stalking vampires, restless Egyptian mummies, foreign master criminals, barbarian Eastern hordes and stomping Prussian soldiers have in common? As Gothic Invasions explains, they may all be seen as instances of invasion fiction, a paranoid fin-de-siècle popular literary phenomenon that responded to prevalent societal fears of the invasion of Britain by an array of hostile foreign forces in the period before the First World War. Gothic Invasions traces the roots of invasion anxiety to concerns about the downside of Britain’s continuing imperial expansion: fears of growing inter-European rivalry and colonial wars and rebellion. It explores how these fears circulated across the British empire and were expressed in fictional narratives drawing strongly upon and reciprocally transforming the conventions and themes of gothic writing. Gothic Invasions enhances our understanding of the interchange between popular culture and politics at this crucial historical juncture, and demonstrates the instrumentality of the ever-versatile and politically-charged gothic mode in this process.

Download or read book History of the Gothic: American Gothic written by Charles L. Crow and published by University of Wales Press. This book was released on 2009-04-01 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Defining the American gothic tradition both within the context of the major movements of intellectual history over the past three-hundred years, as well as within the issues critical to American culture, this comprehensive volume covers a diverse terrain of well-known American writers, from Poe to Faulkner to Toni Morrison and Cormac McCarthy. Charles L. Crow demonstrates how the gothic provides a forum for discussing key issues of changing American culture, explores forbidden subjects, and provides a voice for the repressed and silenced.

Download or read book Gothic Fiction and the Writing of Trauma, 1914-1934 written by Smith Andrew and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2024-05-31 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first detailed analysis of Gothic literature and trauma in World War One This book examines the representation of the ghost-soldier in literature published from 1914-1934 both marking the presence of trauma and attempting to make sense of trauma. Andrew Smith examines short stories, novels, poems and memoirs that employ ghosts to reflect upon feelings of loss, paralleling the literary context with accounts of shell-shock which construe the damaged soldier as psychologically missing and therefore spectre-like. The author argues that literary and non-literary texts repeatedly deploy a form of the uncanny, familiar from a Gothic tradition, as way of reflecting upon grief. In support of this claim, he draws on fiction by well-known authors such as M. R. James, E. F. Benson, Dorothy L. Sayers and Dennis Wheatley, alongside largely forgotten contributions to The Strand and other periodical publications such as The Occult Review. Andrew Smith is Professor of Nineteenth-Century English Literature at the University of Sheffield where he co-directs the Centre for the History of the Gothic. He is the author or editor of over twenty published books including Gothic Death 1740-1914: A Literary History (2016) and The Ghost Story 1840-1920: A Cultural History (2010).

Download or read book Queering Contemporary Gothic Narrative 1970-2012 written by Paulina Palmer and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-11-21 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the development of queer Gothic fiction, contextualizing it with reference to representations of queer sexualities and genders in eighteenth and nineteenth-century Gothic, as well as the sexual-political perspectives generated by the 1970s lesbian and gay liberation movements and the development of queer theory in the 1990s. The book examines the roles that Gothic motifs and narrative strategies play in depicting aspects of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transsexual and intersex experience in contemporary Gothic fiction. Gothic motifs discussed include spectrality, the haunted house, the vampire, doppelganger and monster. Regional Gothic and the contribution that Gothic tropes make to queer historical fiction and historiography receive attention, as does the AIDS narrative. Female Gothic and feminist perspectives are also explored. Writers discussed include Peter Ackroyd, Vincent Brome, Jim Grimsley, Alan Hollinghurst, Randall Kenan, Meg Kingston, Michelle Paver, Susan Swan, Louise Tondeur, Sarah Waters, Kathleen Winter and Jeanette Winterson.