Horror isn't what it used to be. Nor are its Gothic avatars. The meaning of monsters, vampires and ghosts has changed significantly over the last two hundred years, as have the mechanisms (from fiction to fantasmagoria, film and video games) through which they are produced and consumed. Limits of horror, moving from gothic to cybergothic, through technological modernity and across a range of literary, cinematic and popular cultural texts, critically examines these changes and the questions they pose for understanding contemporary culture and subjectivity. Re-examining key concepts such as the uncanny, the sublime, terror, shock and abjection in terms of their bodily and technological implications, this book advances current critical and theoretical debates on Gothic horror to propose a new theory of cultural production based on an extensive discussion of Freud's idea of the death drive. Limits of horror will appeal to students and academics in Literature, Film, Media and Cultural Studies and Cultural Theory. -- .

The dark, destructive and monstrous elements of gothic fiction have traditionally been seen in opposition to the rose-tinted idealism of Romanticism. In this ground-breaking study, Fred Botting re-evaluates the relationship between the two genres in order to plot the shifting alignments of popular and literary fictions with cultural theories, consumption and representations of science. Gothic Romanced traces the history of gothic and romantic writings from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to the present day. It examines the ways in which these genres were aligned with the historical process of modernity - with the Gothic representing the negative aspects of vice and barbarism that accompanied the changing parameters of civilisation, while Romance clung on to traditional values, manners and feelings. The book demonstrates how these genres have evolved together alongside cultural shifts and postmodern theories, blurring the binary between the sacred and the profane. Botting considers Romance and the Gothic from Mary Shelley, Anne Rice and Alasdair Gray through to Alien and Star Trek. He manages a fluid and extensive exploration of generic boundaries, including gothic fiction, romantic poetry, literary pastiches, popular horror fiction, cyberpunk and science fiction.

The screenplays and films of Quentin Tarantino raise profound comic and ethical dilemmas. Developing ideas from Lacanian psychoanalysis, Botting and Wilson explore ethical issues in relation to Tarantino's work, postmodernity and recent cultural theory. They argue that Tarantino's texts provide a provocative and telling contribution to theorized accounts of contemporary culture.

The term `Tarantinian' has been coined to refer to a set of sampled, self-authorizing signs that are cinematically assembled in processes of `consuming-producing-expending' in the general context of a postmodern capitalism that enjoins excess. The Tarantinian ethics are elaborated, in the midst of a homogenized fast-food, movie and video culture, in relation to heterogeneous events of violence, horror and laughter.

Witty and incisive, the book illuminates and interrogates contemporary structures of identity, desire and consumption. It will be of great interest to students of cultural studies, social theory and communication.

This enduringly popular book has become a classic in the expanding and increasingly popular field of Gothic Studies. This long awaited new edition contains a new chapter on 'Contemporary Gothic', an expanded section on American Gothic and more discussion of the gothic in women's film and writing throughout the book. It is also updated in relation to media and technology with further discussion of stage sensations and photography as well as engaging with all major texts and criticism since initial publication in 1995. With the added benefit of series features such as a glossary and annotated further reading section, this remains the ideal guide to the Gothic.

This enduringly popular book has become a classic in the expanding and increasingly popular field of Gothic Studies. This long awaited new edition contains a new chapter on 'Contemporary Gothic', an expanded section on American Gothic and more discussion of the gothic in women's film and writing throughout the book. It is also updated in relation to media and technology with further discussion of stage sensations and photography as well as engaging with all major texts and criticism since initial publication in 1995. With the added benefit of series features such as a glossary and annotated further reading section, this remains the ideal guide to the Gothic.

In the last two decades criticism of Gothic fiction has been transformed from a scholarly backwater, interesting itself in literary curiosities, to a wave of wide-ranging critical investigations collectively convinced of the significance, scope and centrality of the genre. Embracing recent developments in critical theory and practice, work on Gothic has been able to engage systematically and penetratingly with issues of gender, history, race and politics, and so significantly extend the parameters of the field. This collection brings together key works which convey the breadth of what is understood to be Gothic, and the ways in which it has produced, reinforced and undermined received ideas about literature and culture. In addition to its interests in the late eighteenth-century origins of the form, this collection aims to anthologise what it takes to be path-breaking essays on most aspects of Gothic production, including some of its nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first century manifestations across a broad range of cultural media. Titles already available in this series include Postcolonialism (2000, 5 volumes, GBP625) and Feminism (2000, 4 volumes, GBP525). Forthcoming titles include Urban Culture (September 2004, 4 volumes, GBP475) and Folklore (2005, 5 volumes, c.GBP475).

Monstrous media/spectral subjects explores the intersection of monsters, ghosts, representation and technology in Gothic texts from the nineteenth century to the present. It argues that emerging media technologies from the phantasmagoria and magic lantern to the hand-held video camera and the personal computer both shape Gothic subjects and in turn become Gothicised. In a collection of essays that ranges from the Victorian fiction of Wilkie Collins, Bram Stoker and Richard Marsh to the music of Tom Waits, world horror cinema and the TV series Doctor Who, this book finds fresh and innovative contexts for the study of Gothic. Combining essays by well-established and emerging scholars, it should appeal to academics and students researching both Gothic literature and culture and the cultural impact of new technologies. -- .

Analysis of gender dynamics is providing some of the most exciting and innovative research in the field of contemporary Romantic studies. This collection reflects that interest and examines in particular the points at which women Romantic writers anticipate, resist and intersect with the literary productions of their male contemporaries. International scholars provide contributions which range from an examination of Wordsworth's 'Tintern Abbey' to the crossings of gender and class to be found in the English dialect writing of Ann Wheeler of Westmoreland.

Available again in paperback, this study offers a rigorous critical re-reading of fictions of humanity, history, technology and postmodern culture. Taking psychoanalysis into cyberspace, the book develops an innovative theoretical perspective on the relationship between bodies and machines to offer a focused re-examination of notions of desire, metaphor, sexed identity and difference and the process of technological transformation. The book unravels one figure in a detailed, lucid and extensive revision of Lacanian psychoanalysis in association with postmodern theory, feminism and deconstruction. Problematising the easy conjunction of human bodies and inhuman technology, the navel opens into networks of desire, history, culture and machines. Linked to the unconscious, to jokes and dreams, navels appear on the bodies of replicants and in the technological matrix, a strange excess in a future imagined in terms of corporeal 'meat' or posthuman machine. Exploring the significance of this omphalic excess, the book closely examines postmodern and cyberpunk texts (by Thomas Pynchon, Graham Swift, Julian Barnes, William Gibson, Rudy Rucker) alongside detailed readings of contemporary cultural critics and theorists. -- .

From Horace Walpole to Angela Carter and the X-Files, new and familiar texts are reassessed, and common readings of Gothic themes and critical approaches to the genre are interrogated. The popularity of Gothic fictions, themes and films suggests that the genre is the norm as much as the dark underside of contemporary cultural production. Having endured for over two hundred years and settled onto numerous respectable courses of study, the meaning and value of the Gothic seems due for reappraisal. The essays in this volume, written by critics whose work over the last twenty years has considerably advanced the understanding of the Gothic genre, reexamine its literary, historical and cultural significance: from Horace Walpole to Angela Carter and the X-Files, new and familiar texts are reassessed; common readings of Gothic themes and critical approaches to the genreare interrogated: Gothic finds itself integrally involved in the production of a modern sense of the nation; it continues to haunt legal discourses; it underpins social mythologies and ideologies; informs histories of sexuality and identity; offers curious substance to notions of community and culture, and raises questions of ethics and postmodernism. Professor FRED BOTTING teaches in the Department of English at Keele University. Contributors: DAVID PUNTER, ELISABETH BRONFEN, E.J. CLERY, ROBERT MILES, JEAN-JACQUES LECERCLE, LESLIE J. MORAN, HELEN STODDART, FRED BOTTING, JERROLD E. HOGLE.

Monstrous media/spectral subjects explores the intersection of monsters, ghosts, representation and technology in Gothic texts from the nineteenth century to the present. It argues that emerging media technologies from the phantasmagoria and magic lantern to the hand-held video camera and the personal computer both shape Gothic subjects and in turn become Gothicised. In a collection of essays that ranges from the Victorian fiction of Wilkie Collins, Bram Stoker and Richard Marsh to the music of Tom Waits, world horror cinema and the TV series Doctor Who, this book finds fresh and innovative contexts for the study of Gothic. Combining essays by well-established and emerging scholars, it should appeal to academics and students researching both Gothic literature and culture and the cultural impact of new technologies. -- .