The Gothic & American Popular Culture
The Gothic and Twenty-First-Century American Popular Culture examines how twenty-first-century popular culture deploys the gothic mode.
Description
The Gothic and Twenty-First-Century American Popular Culture examines the gothic mode deployed in a variety of texts that touch upon inherently US-American themes, demonstrating its versatility and ubiquity across genres and popular media. The volume is divided into four main thematic sections, spanning representations related to ethnic minorities, bodily monstrosity, environmental anxieties, and haunted technology. The chapters explore both overtly gothic texts and pop culture artifacts that, despite not being widely considered strictly so, rely on gothic strategies and narrative devices.
Reviews
“The book offers a comprehensive and nuanced examination of the gothic mode in contemporary American culture. Its interdisciplinary approach and thematic organization make it a valuable resource for scholars interested in gothic studies, popular culture, and American studies. The volume thoroughly demonstrates how gothic esthetics, effects, and tropes have suffused popular culture. Furthermore, its critical insights into the gothic’s role in addressing modern anxieties and its persistent relevance in the twenty-first century are particularly noteworthy.” (The Journal of Popular Culture 57, nos. 5-6, 2024)
Table of Contents
Introduction (Michael Fuchs and Anna Marta Marini)
Representing Liminality in Asian American Graphic Novels: A Gothic Reading (Andrew Hock Soon Ng)
The White Man’s Dystopia and the Unrealized Black Wishland in Victor LaValle’s The Ballad of Black Tom (Jerry Rafiki Jenkins)
Journey to the Underworld: Death and the Quest for Identity in Chicanx Comics (Anna Marta Marini)
Sharing Trauma: The Rural Home as Transmitter of Disability and Psychic Pain in The Dark and the Wicked (Andrew Sydlik)
“Same Thing Really”: Queer Love and Horror as “Gothicky” in Ratched and The Haunting of Bly Manor (Darren Elliott-Smith)
No “Monsters”: A Manifesto for Contemporary Gothic, Horror, and Weird (GoHoW) (Stephen Shapiro)
Ecogothic Trauma in the Comic Book Series The Low, Low Woods (Alissa Burger)
Ecophobia, Puritan Gothic, and the Female Body in The Witch (Ana Cristina Baniceru)
Nuclear Pasts and Environmental Futures: Radioactivity and Gothic Materiality in the Television Series Chernobyl (Martin Butler and Michael Fuchs)
The Posthuman Gothic in Philip K. Dick’s Electric Dreams (Amaya Fernández Menicucci)
Media Tech Horror: The Locus of Fear and Aural Haunting in the Archive 81 Tape Recordings (Laura Álvarez Trigo)
Cursed Tech as Monstrous Mask: Creepypasta, Technological Threats, and the Cyber-Gothic (Anni Perheentupa)
Millennial Dread: The Cinema of 1999 and the Digital Gothic (Jason Landrum)
