The Gothic World offers an overview of this popular field whilst also extending critical debate in exciting new directions such as film, politics, fashion, architecture, fine art and cyberculture. Structured around the principles of time, space and practice, and including a detailed general introduction, the five sections look at: Gothic Histories Gothic Spaces Gothic Readers and Writers Gothic Spectacle Contemporary Impulses. The Gothic World seeks to account for the Gothic as a multi-faceted, multi-dimensional force, as a style, an aesthetic experience and a mode of cultural expression that traverses genres, forms, media, disciplines and national boundaries and creates, indeed, its own ‘World’.

Stephen King’s popularity lies in his ability to reinterpret the standard Gothic tale in new and exciting ways. Through his eyes, the conventional becomes unconventional and wonderful. King thus creates his own Gothic world and then interprets it for us. This book analyzes King’s interpretations and his mastery of popular literature. The essays discuss adolescent revolt, the artist as survivor, the vampire in popular literature, and much more.

This is the first book to look at the impact of the goth scene worldwide, from its origins right through to the present day. From the UK's sprawling post-punk scene, Japan's highly visual movement, the USA's deathrock explosion and Germany's extremely popular Schwarze Szene, Worldwide Gothic explores how they all came about and the influence they've had on contemporary music and fashion. Spat out of punk at the tail end of the 1970s, goth became a major subculture in the UK with bands like Siouxsie And The Banshees and The Sisters Of Mercy scoring Top Ten hits and its fashion inspiring catwalk collections. After the scene died down in the early 1990s, it spread out to Europe where it attracted hundreds of thousands of followers and became assimilated with other muscial genres. This book also looks at how goth is now returning to its roots now with the emergence of dark rock and indie bands who pay homage to gothic greats like Bauhaus and Joy Division.

Such readers find allusions in Rice's work to that of Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto, to Ann Radcliffe's gothic romances, such as The Mysteries of Udolpho, and to Bram Stoker's Dracula, as do such present-day authors as Clive Barker, Robert R. McCammon, and Stephen King.

‘The dead travel fast and, in our contemporary globalised world, so too does the gothic.’ Examining how gothic has been globalised and globalisation made gothic, this collection of essays explores an emerging globalgothic that is simultaneously a continuation of the western tradition and a wholesale transformation of that tradition which expands the horizons of the gothic in diverse new and exciting ways. Globalgothic contains essays from some of the leading scholars in gothic studies as well as offering insights from new scholars in the field. The contributors consider a wide range of different media, including literary texts, film, dance, music, cyberculture, computer games, and graphic novels. This book will be essential reading for all students and academics interested in the gothic, in international literature, cinema, and cyberspace.

"The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing." This ancient Greek aphorism, preserved in a fragment from the poet Archilochus, describes the central thesis of Isaiah Berlin's masterly essay on Leo Tolstoy and the philosophy of history, the subject of the epilogue to War and Peace. Although there have been many interpretations of the adage, Berlin uses it to mark a fundamental distinction between human beings who are fascinated by the infinite variety of things and those who relate everything to a central, all-embracing system. Applied to Tolstoy, the saying illuminates a paradox that helps explain his philosophy of history: Tolstoy was a fox, but believed in being a hedgehog. One of Berlin's most celebrated works, this extraordinary essay offers profound insights about Tolstoy, historical understanding, and human psychology. This new edition features a revised text that supplants all previous versions, English translations of the many passages in foreign languages, a new foreword in which Berlin biographer Michael Ignatieff explains the enduring appeal of Berlin's essay, and a new appendix that provides rich context, including excerpts from reviews and Berlin's letters, as well as a startling new interpretation of Archilochus's epigram.