Monstrous media/spectral subjects explores the intersection of monsters, ghosts, representation and technology in Gothic texts from the nineteenth century to the present. It argues that emerging media technologies from the phantasmagoria and magic lantern to the hand-held video camera and the personal computer both shape Gothic subjects and in turn become Gothicised.
In a collection of essays that ranges from the Victorian fiction of Wilkie Collins, Bram Stoker and Richard Marsh to the music of Tom Waits, world horror cinema and the TV series Doctor Who, this book finds fresh and innovative contexts for the study of Gothic. Combining essays by well-established and emerging scholars, it should appeal to academics and students researching both Gothic literature and culture and the cultural impact of new technologies.
Table of Content
Introduction – Fred Botting and Catherine Spooner
Part I: Between text and image
2: Gothic wars – media’s lust: on the cultural afterlife of the war dead – Elisabeth Bronfen
3: Kingdom of shadows: fin-de-siècle gothic and early cinema – Paul Foster
4: ‘A mirror with a memory’: the development of the negative in Victorian gothic – Gregory Brophy
5: Modern phantasmagorias and visual culture in Wilkie Collins’s Basil – Laurence Talairach-Vielmas
Part II: Sounding spectres
6: ‘The earth died screaming’: Tom Waits’s Bone Machine – Steen Christiansen
7: Ghosts of the Gristleized – Dean Lockwood
Part III: Moving media
8: ‘Nineteenth century (up-to-date) with a vengeance’: vampirism, Victorianism and collage in Guy Maddin’s Dracula – Pages from a Virgin’s Diary – Dorothea Schuller
9: Spectrality and the deconstruction of the cinema in Neil Burger’s The Illusionist and Steven Millhauser’s short stories – Jean-François Baillon
10: Performing Fabulous Monsters: Re-inventing the gothic personae in bizarre magic – Nik Taylor and Stuart Nolan
11: Body genres, night vision and the female monster: REC and the contemporary horror film – Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet
12: You have been saved: digital memory and salvation – Stephen Curtis
Index
About the author
Catherine Spooner is Lecturer in English at the University of Reading