Modern Gothic: A Reader

This lively collection of essays aims to chart the survival of the gothic strain - the dark, the forbidding, the alienated, the fantastic - in a spectrum of popular and 'high cultural' forms of representation.

Postmodernism/gothicism, Allan Lloyd Smith; the politics of petrification - culture religion history in the fiction of Iain Banks and John Banville, Victor Sage; the pre-oedipal father - the gothicism of "Blue Velvet", Laura Mulvey; wild nights and buried letters - the gothic unconscious of feminist criticism, Ros Ballaster; postmodern feminine horror fictions, Susanne Becker; Isak Dinesen and the fiction of gothic gravity, Helen Stoddart; tearing your soul apart - horror's new monsters; gothic spaces - the political aesthetics of Toni Morrison's "Beloved", Liliane Weissberg; problems of recollection and construction - Stephen King, David Punter; postmodern gothic - desire and reality in Angela Carter's writing, Beate Neumeier; alien invasions by body snatchers and related creatures, David Seed; postcolonial gothic - Ruth Prawer Jhabvala and the Sobhraj case, Judie Newman; gothic convention and modernity in John Ramsay Campbell's short fiction, Giles Menegaldob.