Gothic Britain
Dark Places in the Provinces and Margins of the British Isles
Editor(s) William Hughes,Ruth Heholt
Language: English
Genre(s): Literary Criticism
Series: Gothic Literary Studies
- April 2018 · 272 pages ·216x138mm
- · Hardback - 9781786832337
- · eBook - pdf - 9781786832344
- · eBook - epub - 9781786832351
About The Book
Gothic Britain is the first collection of essays to consider how the Gothic responds to, and is informed by, the British regional experience. Acknowledging how the so-called United Kingdom has historically been divided on nationalistic lines, the twelve original essays in this volume interrogate the interplay of ideas and generic innovations generated in the spaces between the nominal kingdom and its component nations and, innovatively, within those national spaces. Concentrating upon fictions depicting England, Scotland and Wales specifically, Gothic Britain comprehends the generic possibilities of the urban and the rural, of the historical and the contemporary, of the metropolis and the rural settlement – as well as exploring uniquely the fluid space that is the act of travel itself. Reading the textuality of some two hundred years of national and regional identity, Gothic Britain interrogates how the genre has depicted and questioned the natural and built environments of the island of Britain.
Contents
Acknowledgements
Notes on Contributors
Introduction: William Hughes, ‘The Uncanny Space of Regionality: Gothic Beyond the Metropolis’
Part One: Re-imagined Gothic Landscapes: Folklore, Nostalgia and History
Chapter One: Catherine Spooner, ‘“Dark, and cold, and rugged is the North”: Regionalism, Folklore and Elizabeth Gaskell’s “Northern” Gothic’
Chapter Two:Chloe Buckley, ‘Jeremy Dyson’s The Haunted Book (2012), the Gothic Child and the West Yorkshire Moors’
Chapter Three: Richard Storer, ‘“Spook Business”: Hall Caine and the Moment of Manx Gothic’
Chapter Four:Gioia Angelletti, ‘“All those ancient stories that had their dark souls located in woods”: Rural Gothic, Scottish Folklore and Postmodern Conundrums in James Robertson’s The Testament of Gideon Mack’
Part Two: Unnatural Gothic Spaces
Chapter Five: Timothy Jones, ‘Entering the Darkness: Robert Aickman and the Regions’
Chapter Six: Minna Vuohelainen, ‘University Gothic 1880-1910’
Chapter Seven: Holly-Gale Millette, ‘Vampiristic Museums and Library Gothic’
Part Three: Border Crossings and the Threat of Invasion
Chapter Eight: Jamil Mustafa, ‘Lifting the Veil: Allegory, Ambivalence and the (Scottish) Gothic in Walter Scott’s Union Fiction’
Chapter Nine: Ben Richardson, ‘Cosmopolis Fever: Regionalism and Immunity in Mary Shelley’s The Last Man (1826)’
Chaper Ten: Ruth Heholt, ‘The Hammer House of Cornish Horror: The Inversion of Imperial Gothic in The Plague of the Zombies and The Reptile’
Chapter Eleven: Sara Ilott, ‘Black Immigrant/White Cliffs: Dover Gothic and the Borders of Britishness’
Bibliography
Index