Being the first to outline the literary genre, Gothic-postmodernism, this book articulates the psychological and philosophical implications of terror in postmodernist literature, analogous to the terror of the Gothic novel, uncovering the significance of postmodern recurrences of the Gothic, and identifying new historical and philosophical aspects of the genre. While many critics propose that the Gothic has been exhausted, and that its significance is depleted by consumer society's obsession with instantaneous horror, analyses of a number of terror-based postmodernist novels here suggest that the Gothic is still very much animated in Gothic-postmodernism. These analyses observe the spectral characters, doppelgangers, hellish waste lands and the demonised or possessed that inhabit texts such as Paul Auster's City of Glass, Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses and Bret Easton Ellis's Lunar Park. However, it is the deeper issue of the lingering emotion of terror as it relates to loss of reality and self, and to death, that is central to the study; a notion of 'terror' formulated from the theories of continental philosophers and contemporary cultural theorists. With a firm emphasis on the sublime and the unrepresentable as fundamental to this experience of terror; vital to the Gothic genre; and central to the postmodern experience, this study offers an insightful and concise definition of Gothic-postmodernism. It firmly argues that 'terror' (with all that it involves) remains a connecting and potent link between the Gothic and postmodernism: two modes of literature that together offer a unique voicing of the unspeakable terrors of postmodernity.

Preliminary Material -- Introduction -- Defining Gothic-postmodernism -- On Gothic Terror -- Generic Investigations: What is 'Gothic'? -- Postmodernism -- The Gothic and Postmodernism - At the Interface -- Gothic Literary Transformations: The Fin de Siecle and Modernism -- Introduction to Part II -- The Gothic-postmodernist Novel: Three Models -- Gothic Metafiction: The Satanic Verses -- Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita -- Textual Terrors of the Self: Haunting and Hyperreality in Lunar Park -- Conclusion -- Bibliography -- Index.

Om den fantastiske roman fra midten af 1700-tallet til idag med en gennemgang af litteraturkritikkens syn på genren, om udviklingen af den i England, Europa og Amerika, og endelig om dens betydning for moderne litteratur og dagens samfund

From shambling zombies to Gothic ghosts, horror has entertained thrill-seeking readers for centuries. A versatile literary genre, it offers commentary on societal issues, fresh insight into the everyday and moral tales disguised in haunting tropes and grotesque acts, with many stories worthy of critical appraisal. This collection of new essays takes in a range of topics, focusing on historic works such as Ann Radcliffe's Gaston de Blondeville (1826) and modern novels including Max Brooks' World War Z. Other contributions examine weird fiction, Stephen King, Richard Laymon, Indigenous Australian monster mythology and horror in picture books for young children.

Surveying the widespread appropriations of the Gothic in contemporary literature and culture, Post-Millennial Gothic shows contemporary Gothic is often romantic, funny and celebratory. Reading a wide range of popular texts, from Stephenie Meyer's Twilight series through Tim Burton's Gothic film adaptations of Sweeney Todd, Alice in Wonderland and Dark Shadows, to the appearance of Gothic in fashion, advertising and television, Catherine Spooner argues that conventional academic and media accounts of Gothic culture have overlooked this celebratory strain of 'Happy Gothic'. Identifying a shift in subcultural sensibilities following media coverage of the Columbine shootings, Spooner suggests that changing perceptions of Goth subculture have shaped the development of 21st-century Gothic. Reading these contemporary trends back into their sources, Spooner also explores how they serve to highlight previously neglected strands of comedy and romance in earlier Gothic literature.

This collective monograph analyzes post-1989 Central and Eastern Europe through the paradigm of postcoloniality. Based on the assumption that both Western and Soviet imperialism emerged from European modernity, the book is a contribution to the development of a global postcolonial discourse based on a more extensive and nuanced geohistorical comparativism. It suggests that the inclusion of East-Central Europe in European identity might help resolve postcolonialism’s difficulties in coming to terms with both postcolonial and neo-colonial dimensions of contemporary Europe. Analyzing post-communist identity reconstructions under the impact of transformative political, economic and cultural experiences such as changes in perception of time and space (landscapes, cityscapes), migration and displacement, collective memory and trauma, objectifying gaze, cultural self-colonization, and language as a form of power, the book facilitates a mutually productive dialogue between postcolonialism and post-communism. Together the studies map the rich terrain of contemporary East-Central European creative writing and visual art, the latter highlighted through accompanying illustrations.

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.