1st Edition

Rethinking Gothic Transgressions of Gender and Sexuality New Directions in Gothic Studies

Edited By Sarah Faber, Kerstin-Anja Münderlein Copyright 2024
262 Pages 1 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

262 Pages 1 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

262 Pages 1 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

From early examples of queer representation in mainstream media to present-day dissolutions of the human-nature boundary, the Gothic is always concerned with delineating and transgressing the norms that regulate society and speak to our collective fears and anxieties. This volume examines British and American Gothic texts from four centuries and diverse media – including novels, films,... Read more

Acknowledgements

 

Content Warnings

 

List of Contributors

 

Introduction: Gothic and Transgression

 

Part I: Gothic in the Long Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries

 

Chapter 1 .Excessive fainting and parodic bending: Analysing socio-political criticism through the heroine’s body in the Gothic novel and the Gothic parody. Kerstin-Anja Münderlein

 

Chapter 2 The Comfort of the Male Gaze in Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend. Franziska Quabeck

 

Chapter 3 Gothic Monster or Creative Muse? Strategies of Empowerment in Grace King’s “One of Us”. Alycia Garbay

 

Chapter 4 From Gothic Heroines to Monstrous Prom Queens: Gender Horror in Dracula and Jennifer’s Body. Kit Schuster

 

Chapter 5 Violet Strange: Gothic Girl Detective. Keli Masten

 

Part II: Gothic from the World Wars to the Present

 

Chapter 6 “I Don’t Want to Grow Up:” Abject Adolescence and Southern Gothic in Carson McCullers’s Short Stories.  Jerneja Planinsek-Zlof

 

Chapter 7 The Unspeakable Plant – Gender, Desire and the Monstrous Vegetal in Frances Hardinge’s The Lie TreeAnja Höing

 

Chapter 8 ‘Annihilation’ of the Gendered Human: Ecogothic Transgressions of Anthropocentrism. Tamara Schmitt and Maria Weber

 

Chapter 9 Transgressing Genre and Gender: Masculinities and (Post)Feminism in Neo-Gothic Narratives. Miriam Borham-Puyal

 

Chapter 10  “But it seems to me that I have absorbed Ruth” – Gothic Doubles in Laura Purcell’s The Corset. Lara Brändle

 

Chapter 11 Archive of the Unspeakable: Unsilencing Violence in Carmen Maria Machado’s In the Dream HouseCarolin Jesussek

 

Chapter 12 Narrating the (Queer) Gothic in The Magnus Archives Podcast. Maria Juko

 

Chapter 13 The Wholesome Queer Gothic: Transgressing Narrative Norms and Shifting LGBTQIA+ Representation in Contemporary Re-Inventions of the Gothic. Sarah Faber

 

Conclusion: Gothic Prospects: Ancient Monsters and New Anxieties

 

Index

Biography

Sarah Faber’s central research areas are Game Studies, the fantastic, and nineteenth-century British literature, united by an overarching interest in narrative technique and constructions of (especially queer and/or gendered) identity and belonging. She completed her studies at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, where she wrote her doctoral thesis on narration in multiplayer games. She was a research and teaching associate at JGU Mainz for five years and a fellow at Brandenburg University of Applied Sciences for two. She has been a board member of the German Association for Research in the Fantastic since 2022.

Kerstin-Anja Münderlein is a lecturer and post-doc at the Institute of English and American Studies (Department of English Literature) at the University of Bamberg where she completed her PhD on Gothic parody in 2019. Her fields of research include Gothic novels and parodies of the long eighteenth century with a focus on quixotism and normative femininity, British poetry of the Great War (especially Vera Brittain’s writings), and the constructions of femininities and masculinities in English Golden Age crime fiction. Her methodological focus lies on Gender Studies, audience, and reception theory. She is assistant editor for Crime Fiction Studies and currently edits a themed issue on gender and crime for the journal. Her most recent publications include Genre and Reception in the Gothic Parody: Framing the Subversive Heroine (Routledge, 2022) and the edited collection Crime Fiction, Femininities and Masculinities (forthcoming 2024).