Gothic Weekend

To celebrate that Halloween is this weekend I got three books from the library

Fred Botting's "Limits of Horror",

from Amazon : "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."

 


Catherine Spooner's "Fashioning Gothic Bodies",
 from Amazon: "This study explores the role played by clothing in the discourses of the Gothic. It makes an explicit connection between the veils, masks and disguises of gothic convention and historically specific fashion discourses, from the revealing chemise-dress popularized by Queen Marie Antoinette to the subcultural style of contemporary goths. In so doing it sheds light on the cultural construction of gothic bodies. Taking an original, interdisciplinary approach, Catherine Spooner offers readings of literary, cinematic and popular cultural texts in the context of fashion from the 1790s to the 1990s. Progressing chronologically from the novels of Radcliffe and Lewis through the "sensation" fiction of the Victorian period and the gothic fiction of the "fin-de-siecle", the text culminates with 20th-century film and the supposed resurgence of the gothic in pre-millennial culture. This book should be of interest to students working on the gothic in literary, film and cultural studies, as well as to literary scholars and fashion theoreticians."


You also can check it out here:
http://books.google.de/books?id=3Bag7aL5rCwC&printsec=frontcover&dq=fashioning+gothic+bodies&source=bl&ots=eQPWqKct2u&sig=Ck_oicwLsp9PKBhonhwnY3WejRk&hl=de&ei=FwfLTLbtO4mgOtDDlJYB&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CCIQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q&f=false

And last but definetly not least,

David Punter's "The Gothic"

from Amazon: "This guide provides an overview of the most significant issues and debates in Gothic studies.

• Provides an overview of the most significant issues and debates in Gothic studies.
• Explains the origins and development of the term Gothic.
• Explores the evolution of the Gothic in both literary and non–literary forms, including art, architecture and film.
• Features authoritative readings of key works, ranging from Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto to Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho.
• Considers recurrent concerns of the Gothic such as persecution and paranoia, key motifs such as the haunted castle, and figures such as the vampire and the monster.

• Includes a chronology of key Gothic texts, including fiction and film from the 1760s to the present day, and a comprehensive bibliography."

Pretty awesome, right?