Acknowledgements
1.Now Welcome the Night: The Origins of Gothic Culture
2. Every True Goth: From Horace Walpole's Strawberry Hill to Thomas
De Quincey' Opium Dreams
3. With Raven Wings: Ann Radcliffe, German Horrors ands the Divine
Marquis
4. Land of Shadows: Melmoth the Wanderer and Sweeney Todd
5. Dark Reflections in a Dull Mirror: Fuseli's ‘The Nightmare' and
the Origins of Gothic Theatre
6. Desire and Loathing Strangely Mixed: Gothic Melodrama and The
Phantom of the Opera
7. Do You See It? The Gothic and the Ghostly
8. It's Alive: The Rise of the Gothic Movie
9. After Midnight: Goth Culture, Vampire Games and the Irresistible
Rise of Twilight
Further Selected Readings in the Gothic
Index
A comprehensive guide to the history of Gothic from the eighteenth century to the present day that includes original research.
CLIVE BLOOM is Emeritus Professor, Middlesex University, UK.
In this exuberant and joyously morbid book, full of generous and
juicy quotations, he [Bloom] explores the cultural persistence of
Gothic on both sides of the Atlantic. His historical approach
interweaves literary, political and cultural analysis with brief
biographies documenting all manner of bizarre behaviour. The result
is a broad, international and rich consideration of cruelty,
violence, torture, misery, decadence, pain, pollution, corruption
and decay. Cue the dungeons, prisons, monsters, corpses and
banditti! ... Introducing new ideas and synthesising a good deal of
scholarship, this colourful survey of the inception and development
of Gothic is accessible, fun and over the top.
*Times Higher Education*
This highly accessible book deals vividly with the taste for Gothic
across the last two centuries, and expertly introduces the reader
to a range of the weird and the wonderful in literature, in art,
and in the sometimes larger-than-life personae of the great figures
of Gothic culture.
*Professor David Punter, University of Bristol, UK*
"In contrast with countless studies of classic Gothic literature
and Gothic architecture, Bloom's book is a wide-ranging examination
of the 'gothic sensibility' that keeps the horror genre alive
today. Literary icons like Walpole, Lewis and Radcliff receive
their due, but Bloom goes much further and deftly interweaves their
essential histories and biographies with those of dozens of other
artists, playwrights and filmmakers, ever mindful of influential
political and religious contexts, to illustrate both the slow
evolution of a genre and the undying essence of the gothic. While
presenting a broad range of information and ideas, Bloom maintains
his enthusiastic focus on the deeply-felt 'human need for the
mysterious' that captures the vitality of true gothic art for its
first and most devoted audience."
*Joseph Maddrey, author/producer of Nightmares in Red, White and
Blue: The Evolution of the American Horror Film*
"Clive Bloom has pulled off the very difficult trick of writing a
book on the Gothic which tells us something new. He not only
manages to cover the early history of this protean and
multi-generic aesthetic mode in both its transatlantic and European
manifestations but he brings that history right up to date with his
treatment of its most recent revivals in the ‘Twilight' series.
What is especially interesting about this book is its relation of
Gothic to nineteenth-century fads for the paranormal and
spiritualism and Bloom shows how these also had an influence on the
early cinema. There is plenty to enjoy in this lively book. New
readers will see it as a comprehensive primer while I cannot
imagine that even the most experienced and jaded reader of the
Gothic and its massive secondary literature will not find something
of fresh interest."
*Professor John Simons, Faculty of Arts, Macquarie University,
Australia*
‘Clive Bloom's Gothic Histories rescues the subject from the
cobwebby corner of the ivory tower in which it has recently become
confined by the more esoteric branches of academic scholarship. It
traces - in engaging, forceful style - the two hundred and fifty
year special effect which turned a burlesque, faux medieval tale
written by Horace Walpole in mid-eighteenth century Twickenham, via
countless variations and remixes, into the global cultural attitude
of today. The variations - sometimes fanciful, sometimes furious -
include poems, plays, novels, short stories, penny-dreadfuls, pulp
magazines, memoirs, polemics, phantasmagorias, horror movies, tv
series, contemporary Goth culture and computer games. From the dawn
of the Gothic to Twilight. The sublime, the exotic, the
transgressive, the dreamlike, the schlocky and the subtle, the
other - they are all in here. I enjoyed reading Gothic Histories a
lot.'
*Professor Sir Christopher Frayling, author of Vampyres and
Nightmare: The Birth of Horror, and co-curator of the Tate Britain
exhibition Gothic Nightmares: Fuseli to Blake*
Drawn to the hallucinatory, enchanted by the morbid, the gothic
sensibility mixes incarceration with necromancy, technology with
architecture, vampires with séances. The bizarre and wild,
Professor Bloom explains in this spirited survey, emerged with the
European fear of modernity. Beginning with Horace Walpole's The
Castle of Otranto in 1764, authors disturbed by the loss of control
presented by democracy, rebellion, and technology reacted by
reviving antiquarian settings, scientific subversion, and macabre
predicaments.... This is a brisk primer, with generous excerpts
from primary sources, free of jargon or academic posturing.
Selected reading lists guide inquirers, while Professor Bloom
covers a lot in a little book. It is recommended to anyone curious
about why the gothic craze began, why it has lasted so long, and
how it continues to translate its shape-shifting spells." -New
York Journal of Books
"You will enjoy this exhilarating grand tour of Gothic."BBC History
Magazine
"There's a sense of joy and exhilaration that comes across,
conveying Bloom's excitement at discovering so many connections and
interweaving threads. Gothic Histories is refreshing in its
academic thoroughness (without reading like a dry and dusty
textbook) and unusual in its thoughtful yet meandering nature."
-Oliver Ho, Popmatters, August 18, 2010
'Bloom's episodic and anecdotal style do not only make these
accounts fresh and enlightening, but also fun to read and
accessible...Bloom's new addition to the canon makes for that very
rare breed of scholarly work: thoroughly entertaining and
informative academic writing.'
*The Gothic Imagination (Blog)*
There is certainly new information here: anecdotes to surprise and
delight the most well-read Gothic scholar... The synthesis of
information also feels fresh... the breadth of knowledge of
literature and culture and the sheer volume of material Bloom
weaves into his narrative is impressive... a useful book for the
general reader seeking to learn more about the history of Gothic...
it accumulates a wealth of fascinating detail.
*Oxford Journals, vol 60, no 230*
Bloom's book is fun, light and, despite its title, more text- than
context-based in its analysis. He has a fine ear for a good story,
and Gothic Histories is full of interesting facts and anecdotes
about authors such as Horace Walpole, William Beckford and "Monk"
Lewis...he also makes time for some more unusual diversions among
authors, and texts, which are less readily associated with classic
Gothic literature...His strength is quite clearly his exploration
of individual texts, and his study is most certainly
inter-disciplinary.
*Loughborough University, UK*
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