The Gothic and Death

The Gothic and death is the first ever published study to investigate how the diverse strands of the Gothic and the concepts of death, dying, mourning, and memorialization - what the Editor broadly refers to as the Death Question - have intersected and been configured cross-culturally from the mid-eighteenth century to the present day. An interdisciplinary collection of fifteen essays by international scholars, The Gothic and death draws on recent scholarship in Gothic Studies, film theory, Women's and Gender Studies and Thanatology Studies to consider the Gothic's engagement, by way of its unique necropolitics and necropoetics, with death's challenges to all systems of meaning and its relationship to the culturally contingent concepts of memento mori, subjectivity, spectrality and corporeal transcendence. Attentive to our defamiliarization with death since the advent of enlightened modernity and the death-related anxieties engendered by that transition, The Gothic and death combines detailed attention to socio-historical and cultural contexts with rigorous close readings of artistic, literary, televisual and cinematic works. This surprisingly underexplored area of enquiry is considered by way of such popular and uncanny figures as corpses, ghosts, zombies and vampires, and across various cultural and literary forms as Graveyard Poetry, Romantic poetry, Victorian literature, nineteenth-century Italian and Russian literature, Anglo-American film and television, contemporary Young Adult fiction, Bollywood film noir, and new media technologies that complicate our ideas of mourning, haunting and the afterlife of the self.The collection will be of interest to all students and scholars in the fields of Gothic literature and Gothic studies.