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Books > Health, Home & Family > Mind, body & spirit > Unexplained phenomena / the paranormal > General
The Gothic, Romanticism's gritty older sibling, has flourished in
myriad permutations since the eighteenth century. In Gothicka,
Victoria Nelson identifies the revolutionary turn it has taken in
the twenty-first. Today's Gothic has fashioned its monsters into
heroes and its devils into angels. It is actively reviving
supernaturalism in popular culture, not as an evil dimension
divorced from ordinary human existence but as part of our daily
lives. To explain this millennial shift away from the traditionally
dark Protestant post-Enlightenment Gothic, Nelson studies the
complex arena of contemporary Gothic subgenres that take the form
of novels, films, and graphic novels. She considers the work of Dan
Brown and Stephenie Meyer, graphic novelists Mike Mignola and Garth
Ennis, Christian writer William P. Young (author of The Shack), and
filmmaker Guillermo del Toro. She considers twentieth-century
Gothic masters H. P. Lovecraft, Anne Rice, and Stephen King in
light of both their immediate ancestors in the eighteenth century
and the original Gothic-the late medieval period from which Horace
Walpole and his successors drew their inspiration. Fictions such as
the Twilight and Left Behind series do more than follow the
conventions of the classic Gothic novel. They are radically
reviving and reinventing the transcendental worldview that informed
the West's premodern era. As Jesus becomes mortal in The Da Vinci
Code and the child Ofelia becomes a goddess in Pan's Labyrinth,
Nelson argues that this unprecedented mainstreaming of a
spiritually driven supernaturalism is a harbinger of what a
post-Christian religion in America might look like.
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