Welcome to our book review site go-pdf.online!
You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Weird Fiction and Science at the Fin de Siècle
This book explores how nineteenth-century science stimulated the emergence of weird tales at the fin de siècle, and examines weird fiction by British writers who preceded and influenced H. P. Lovecraft, the most famous author of weird fiction. From laboratory experiments, thermodynamics, and Darwinian evolutionary theory to psychology, Theosophy, and the ‘new’ physics of atoms and forces, science illuminated supernatural realms with rational theories and practices. Changing scientific philosophies and questioning of traditional positivism produced new ways of knowing the world—fertile borderlands for fictional as well as real-world scientists to explore. Reading Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) as an inaugural weird tale, the author goes on to analyse stories by Arthur Machen, Edith Nesbit, H. G. Wells, William Hope Hodgson, E. and H. Heron, and Algernon Blackwood to show how this radical fantasy mode can be scientific, and how sciences themselves were often already weird.
Body Gothic
The gothic, particularly in its contemporary incarnations, is often constructed around largely disembodied concepts such as spectrality or the haunted. Body Gothic offers a counter-narrative that reinstates the importance of viscerality to the gothic mode. It argues that contemporary discourses surrounding our bodies are crucial to our understanding of the social messages in fictional mutilation and of the pleasures we may derive from it. This book considers a number of literary and cinematic movements that have, over the past three decades, purposely turned the body into a meaningful gothic topos. Each chapter in Body Gothic is dedicated to a different corporeal subgenre: splatterpunk, body...
The Gothic in Contemporary British Trauma Fiction
This book examines the intersection of trauma and the Gothic in six contemporary British novels: Martin Amis’s London Fields, Margaret Drabble’s The Gates of Ivory, Ian McEwan’s Atonement, Pat Barker’s Regeneration and Double Vision, and Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go. In these works, the Gothic functions both as an expression of societal violence at the turn of the twenty-first century and as a response to the related crisis of representation brought about by the contemporary individual’s highly mediated and spectatorial relationship to this violence. By locating these six novels within the Gothic tradition, this work argues that each text, to borrow a term from Jacques Derrida, “participates” in the Gothic in ways that both uphold the paradigm of “unspeakability” that has come to dominate much trauma fiction, as well as push its boundaries to complicate how we think of the ethical relationship between witnessing and writing trauma.
The Haunted States of America
The study highlights several writers who have not received much, if any, attention among Gothic scholars. This allows readers exposure to writers they may have never encountered before or may realize dimensions to the authors’ works they have never considered. The study reconsiders scholarship’s understanding of post-war American literature. This gives readers, students, and scholars a new approach to discussing post-war fiction that is not delimited to widely accepted understanding of how Cold War anxieties were manifested in fiction. The study contextualizes the fiction it examines within each work’s respective region. This allows readers a new way of approaching not just post-war Gothic fiction but Gothic fiction in general.
Women's Space
From the Star Wars expanded universe to Westworld, the science fiction western has captivated audiences for more than fifty years. These twelve new essays concentrate on the female characters in the contemporary science fiction western, addressing themes of power, agency, intersectionality and the body. Discussing popular works such as Fringe, Guardians of the Galaxy and Mass Effect, the essayists shed new light on the gender dynamics of these beloved franchises, emphasizing inclusion and diversity with their critical perspectives.
Editing the Soul
Personal genome testing, gene editing for life-threatening diseases, synthetic life: once the stuff of science fiction, twentieth- and twenty-first-century advancements blur the lines between scientific narrative and scientific fact. This examination of bioengineering in popular and literary culture shows that the influence of science on science fiction is more reciprocal than we might expect. Looking closely at the work of Margaret Atwood, Richard Powers, and other authors, as well as at film, comics, and serial television such as Orphan Black, Everett Hamner shows how the genome age is transforming both the most commercial and the most sophisticated stories we tell about the core of human ...
Postmodern Vampires
Postmodern Vampires: Film, Fiction, and Popular Culture is the first major study to focus on American cultural history from the vampire’s point of view. Beginning in 1968, Ní Fhlainn argues that vampires move from the margins to the centre of popular culture as representatives of the anxieties and aspirations of their age. Mapping their literary and screen evolution on to the American Presidency, from Richard Nixon to Donald Trump, this essential critical study chronicles the vampire’s blood-ties to distinct socio-political movements and cultural decades in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Through case studies of key texts, including Interview with the Vampire, The Lost Boys, Blade, Twilight, Let Me In, True Blood and numerous adaptations of Dracula, this book reveals how vampires continue to be exemplary barometers of political and historical change in the American imagination. It is essential reading for scholars and students in Gothic and Horror Studies, Film Studies, and American Studies, and for anyone interested in the articulate undead.
Cornish Gothic, 1830-1913
This book asks why so many authors drew on Cornwall for inspiration across the long nineteenth century, and considers the seismic cultural changes in Cornwall that spurred this interest – from the collapse of the mining industry to the developing national rail network; from the birth of tourism to the neomedieval rise in interest in King Arthur. Understanding frequently overlooked Cornwall in this period is vital to understanding Gothic literature, the Victorian imagination, intellectual and creative networks, and attitudes towards regionality. The first part of the book considers landscape and legend, defining a mining Gothic tradition, exposing the shipwreck as Gothic mastertrope, and demonstrating how antiquarians drew from Cornish legends and lore. The second part explores encounters with modernity, investigating the impact of railway expansion on access to Cornwall, the development of a Cornish King Arthur as a key figure of Victorian masculinity, and the specific features of the Cornish ghost story.
The Gothic World
The Gothic World offers an overview of this popular field whilst also extending critical debate in exciting new directions such as film, politics, fashion, architecture, fine art and cyberculture. Structured around the principles of time, space and practice, and including a detailed general introduction, the five sections look at: Gothic Histories Gothic Spaces Gothic Readers and Writers Gothic Spectacle Contemporary Impulses. The Gothic World seeks to account for the Gothic as a multi-faceted, multi-dimensional force, as a style, an aesthetic experience and a mode of cultural expression that traverses genres, forms, media, disciplines and national boundaries and creates, indeed, its own ‘World’.
