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Distributed for University of Wales Press

History of the Gothic: Twentieth-Century Gothic

Continuing the University of Wales Press’s acclaimed series of explorations of the Gothic and its legacy, Twentieth-Century Gothic focuses on the continuing presence of the gothic in the long twentieth century, from The Turn of the Screw to Sarah Waters’s The Little Stranger, with looks along the way at the work of Clive Barker, Angela Carter, Conan Doyle, Rudyard Kipling, and more. Addressing the question of why we are fascinated by ghosts, demons, and monsters of all sorts, despite the professed rationality of our society, Armitt shows how such stories of these supernatural creatures can serve as an outlet for deep-rooted fears about continuing problems in contemporary society.


193 pages | 5 1/2 x 8 1/2 | © 2011

Gothic Literary Studies

Literature and Literary Criticism: General Criticism and Critical Theory


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Reviews

“The great strength of this excellent book is that it is not a straightforward tour through the canonical works of the twentieth-century Gothic. It is much more interesting than that. Armitt takes the reader on a devious, elliptical, fascinating journey through a range of strange texts, some well-known and others unjustifiably less so, combining critical inventiveness and precision with a constant undertow of reference to major cultural and social preoccupations—child abuse, trauma, aftermaths of war, sexual uncertainty and transgression—which both illumine the texts and are in turn illumined, through a specifically distorted Gothic lens, by them.”

David Punter, University of Bristol

Table of Contents

Series Editors’ Foreword
Acknowledgements
Chronology
Illustrations
Introduction

1. Gothic Pathologies: Haunted Children
2. Building Suspense: Architectural Gothic
3. Gothic Inhumanity
4. Queering the Gothic
5. Survey of Criticism
6. Conclusion: Thriller and Stranger

Notes
Annotated Bibliography
Index

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