The Gothic in times of crisis

by John Whatley (Editor)

Overview

The Gothic in times of crisis reflects contemporary society, showing how the Gothic modes continually resets its own forms to encompass each new reality, each new apocalypse, each new plague or crisis. This collection expands oncurrent scholarship to show how the Gothic challenges our understanding of both older and recent crises and, in turn, disturbs all genre complacencies to expose and confront the problems and contradictions in what our world has been, has become, or is in danger of becoming. This collection explores Gothic’s current relevance to the contestations of ideas and the underlying and visible conflicts it dramatizes across a wide range of media. In various ways, it reveals what happens to Gothic modes now they confront the increasingly Gothic realities of our times, sometimesby recalling earlier crises and ideological contestations leading up to them.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781526191724
Publisher:	Manchester University Press
Publication date:	12/02/2025
Series:	International Gothic Series
Pages:	352
Product dimensions:	5.43(w) x 8.50(h) x (d)

About the Author

John Whatley is a retired lecturer from the Simon Fraser UniversityDepartment of English and a retired associate member of the School of Criminology at Simon Fraser University. He is currently managing editor of Simon Fraser UniversityPublications.

Table of Contents

List of contributors
Series editor's preface
Preface
Introduction

Part I The Gothic and pandemics past and present
1 Plague apocalypse then and now: Gothic visions of the end times - Faye Ringel
2 "The End of the World is Nigh": pandemic and apocalypse in the Gothic - David Punter
3 Pandemic paranoia: Gothic narratives of lockdown - Sue Zlosnik

Part II Past and present adaptations of deep cultural conflicts
4 Fluid memories of horror: the presence of water in Lovecraft’s "The Call of Cthulhu" and Alan Parker's Angel Heart - Antonio Alcala Gonzalez
5 The Beguiled: scripts of crisis in a contentious southern - Marie Liénard-Yeterian
6 Gothic returns and Canadian residential schools: Armand Ruffo’s A Windigo Tale then and now - Cynthia Sugars
7 From medieval romance to Gothic film: The Green Knight - Jerrold Hogle

Part III Ghosts at the impasse: current aporias in the spiritual, the material, and the maternal
8 Ghost stories after 1914- Anastasia Lipinskaya
9 Ghostly troubles in contemporary cinema - Gilles Menegaldo
10 Stable or unstable matter? Eighteenth-century Gothic objects and Gothic postmodernity - John Whatley

Part IV Monstrosity and womanhood: disturbing the maternal
11 Monstrous mothers in twenty-first-century female Gothic from 2013 to 2020 - Karen Budra
12 Sùrbiles (2017): women vampires in Sardinia - Alessandra Serra
13 Contagion and the maternal in apocalyptic Gothic from 2014 to 2021 - Mariaconcetta Costantini

Part V Crisis in the Anthropocene: recent eco-Gothic
14 Olfactory interruptions: malodor, atmospheric invasion, and eco-Gothic in A. S. Byatt’s “The Thing in the Forest” and Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away - Li-hsin Hsu
15 Contagion, ingestion, and sustainability in Margaret Atwood, 2006–16 - Gina Wisker
16 Ambivalent eco-Gothic in three 2020–21 films - Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet
17 Mati Diop’s Atlantique and the atmospherics of Gothic spectrality - Mark Deggan