The “Schoolhouse Gothic,” undertaken by insiders and outsiders to the academy alike and embodied both in literature and in academic discourse, draws on Gothic metaphors and themes in representing and interrogating contemporary American schools and educators. Curses from the past take the form of persistent power inequities (of race, gender, class, and age) and, rather ironically, the very Enlightenment that was to save the moderns from rigid, ancient, mystified hierarchies. In Schoolhouse Gothic literature, including works by Stephen King, Flannery O’Connor, Toni Morrison, Joyce Carol Oates, and David Mamet, school buildings, classrooms, and/or offices, function as traps, or analogues to the claustrophobic family mansions, monasteries, and convents of old. In Schoolhouse Gothic scholarship, the trap is academic objectivity, viewed not as a lofty goal but rather as an institutional strategy of concealment that blinds the scholar to his or her own prejudices and renders even the most well-meaning complicit with inequitable power structures. The combination of curse and trap common to the Gothic scenario produces paranoia, violence, and monstrosity. In Schoolhouse Gothic literature, schools turn students into psychopaths and machines. In the scholarship, the product is discourse, or “epistemic violence” reified. The Schoolhouse Gothic suggests—at the very least—that Americans have become increasingly uneasy about the role of the academy, increasingly mistrustful of its guardians, and increasingly convinced that something sinister lies behind its officially benevolent exterior.

The third volume of The Cambridge History of the Gothic is the first book to provide an in-depth history of Gothic literature, film, television and culture in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries (c. 1896-present). Identifying key historical shifts from the birth of film to the threat of apocalypse, leading international scholars offer comprehensive coverage of the ideas, events, movements and contexts that shaped the Gothic as it entered a dynamic period of diversification across all forms of media. Twenty-three chapters plus an extended introduction provide in-depth accounts of topics including Modernism, war, postcolonialism, psychoanalysis, counterculture, feminism, AIDS, neo-liberalism, globalisation, multiculturalism, the war on terror and environmental crisis. Provocative and cutting edge, this will be an essential reference volume for anyone studying modern and contemporary Gothic culture.

Within the Euro-American literary tradition, Gothic stories of childhood and adolescence have often served as a tool for cultural propaganda, advancing colonialist, white supremacist and patriarchal ideologies. This book turns our attention to modern and contemporary Gothic texts by hemispheric American writers who have refigured uncanny youth in ways that invert these cultural scripts. In the hands of authors ranging from Octavio Paz and Maryse Condé to N. Scott Momaday and Carmen Maria Machado, Gothic conventions become a means of critiquing pathological structures of power in the space of the Americas. As fictional children and adolescents confront persisting colonial and neo-imperialist architectures, grapple with the everyday ramifications of white supremacist thinking, navigate rigged systems of socioeconomic power, and attempt to frustrate patterns of gendered, anti-queer violence, the uncanny and the nightmarish in their lives force readers to reckon affectively as well as intellectually with these intersecting forms of injustice.

This unique and timely collection examines childhood and the child character throughout Stephen King’s works, from his early novels and short stories, through film adaptations, to his most recent publications. King’s use of child characters within the framework of horror (or of horrific childhood) raises questions about adult expectations of children, childhood, the American family, child agency, and the nature of fear and terror for (or by) children. The ways in which King presents, complicates, challenges, or terrorizes children and notions of childhood provide a unique lens through which to examine American culture, including both adult and social anxieties about children and childhood across the decades of King’s works.

When boarding-school fiction became popular in the 19th century, it tended to be warm and nostalgic, filled with sporting events, practical jokes, and schemes to get even with campus bullies. All of that changed in the era discussed in this book. Holden Caulfield, the narrator of J. D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye, drops out of one prep school and is expelled from two others. The conflicts between students in John Knowles's Devon School novels become so heated that two young men die. And in the controversial novel Good Times/Bad Times, James Kirkwood portrays the headmaster of a private academy as closeted, deeply neurotic, and infatuated with an 18-year-old who has recently enrolled at his school. In spite of their unsettling images of anguish and cruelty, these and other American boarding-school novels have attracted large audiences and influenced countless school narratives in fiction, drama, television and film. Many books have been written about British school stories. This is the first study that explores the history of boarding-school fiction in the United States.

Though often disparaged by literary critics, Stephen King's work has influenced a generation of horror and science fiction writers. Acting as a study guide, this book features the important critical interpretations of the horror master's work.