Black Diasporic Gothic

Black Diasporic Gothic can trace its origins back to the nineteenth century at the height of the Gothic’s appearance, when many black writers began to appropriate the genre to describe the real horrors of existence within racially oppressive and enslaving societies. However, many twenty-first-century Black Gothic texts suggest that modifying traditional Gothic monsters is not enough to create subversive work.Rather modern texts such as Jeremy Love’s Baypu (2009-10), Helen Oyeyimi’sWhite is for Witching (2009) and Jordan Peele’s Get Out (2017) force Western readers out of their region and tradition entirely by introducing monsters from the African Diaspora, creatures recording the horror of physical and cultural theft even as they demand recognition of a pre-encounter cultural history. In each text, marginalised characters are able to recognise, define and combat monstrous assailants primarily because they exist outside of dominant ideological systems. Thus twenty-first century Black Gothic texts posit the existence of radically alternative, and ultimately liberating, knowledge systems within marginalised locations.

Posthuman Gothic

This chapter traces the posthuman Gothic in a number of recent examples – in film (Ex Machina (2015), Ghost in the Shell (2017)), television (Westworld(2016–), Black Mirror (2011–)), narrative fiction (Marisha Pessl's Night Film (2013) and Gemma Files’s Experimental Film (2015)) and graphic novels (The Beauty (2016–). These texts explore the many ways in which our technological entanglements tend to blur the boundaries between ‘human’ and ‘non-human’. While attempts at defining a ‘posthuman Gothic’ are relatively recent (see Bolton 2014; Heise-von der Lippe 2017), the narrative exploration of these phenomena can be traced back to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818) and its lasting impact on later posthuman narratives. By aestheticising the uncanniness of the automaton – the almost-but-not-quite human cyborg or the abject, biotech human-animal hybrid – posthuman Gothic texts draw attention to the many ways in which these processes can and will go wrong and highlight the instability and ultimate unsustainability of our most basic ontological category – the human.

Steampunk

This chapter identifies an intersection between the dark aesthetic practice associated with goth and the more sepia-toned steampunk community. The central argument employs the post-subculture model, which sees subcultures as elective and postmodern in terms of identity politics.Whitby Gothic Weekend, in the UK,is used as a departure point because it has an established steampunk fringe event and has hosted the US steampunk band, Abney Park, as well as other bands familiar to steampunk, such as The Men that will not be Blamed for Nothing. This is noteworthy, as it suggests considerable overlap between the cultures, but it also flags up contentions and debates surrounding authenticity and boundary marking in the goth subculture. This chapter then undertakes a survey of themes in steampunk music, fashion, whilst also theorising the subculture’s relationship to activism, Neo-Victorianism, and postcolonialism.

Gothic Comedy

Comedy has become an increasingly prevalent feature of Gothic in the twenty-first century, and thus Gothic comedy can be found across a multitude of media. This chapter surveys the kinds of comedy that appear in contemporary Gothic (such as sitcom, stand-up, romantic comedy, mock-documentary) and argues that, in the twenty-first century, Gothic comedy often functions to travesty culturally significant concepts of family, domesticity and childhood in the light of a liberal identity politics. Beginning with twentieth-century precedents such as television sitcom The Addams Family (1964–6) and Edward Gorey’s illustrations, the chapter analyses a range of contemporary texts including The League of Gentlemen (1999–2017), Corpse Bride (2005), Ruby Gloom (2006–8),Hotel Transylvania (2012) and What We Do in the Shadows (2014). It concludes that far from being frivolous or disposable, contemporary Gothic comedy forms a politically significant function in its tendency to undermine right-wing ideologies of the family and promote a celebratory politics of difference and inclusion.

Neoliberal Gothic

This chapter engages with the geopolitical context of the Gothic’s migration from the periphery to the fast-beating heart of popular culture – specifically the rise to economic and cultural predominance of global neoliberalism. I contend that the Gothic texts of the neoliberal age can be seen to undertake the same kind of cultural work that was carried out by the Gothic mode in earlier periods of socio-economic turbulence. And, as in earlier periods, we can see a variety of ideological allegiances at play in Gothic texts of the neoliberal age – ranging from the revolutionary to the radical to the downright reactionary. The chapter ranges across texts and media including novels – i.e. Justin Cronin’s The Passage (2010), Hemlock Grove (2013–15), The Strain (2012–17), True Blood (2008–14), World War Z (2006) and In the Flesh (2013–14).

Contemporary Ghosts

This chapter tracks the dominant trends of the twenty-first-century ghost. It argues that Sadako, the techno-onryō from Ringu (1998), has proved a model that would spread in countless ways, cementing the idea of the media ghost in both Asian and western media, sometimes focused on new technology but with a surprising tendency to evoke ‘outdated’ media as haunted/haunting residue. It also discusses the availability of the ghost not only to popular media like reality television and to middlebrow horror films such as those of Blumhouse Pictures, but also to ‘legitimate’ art, like Sarah Water’s The Little Stranger (2007) and works by films like film auteurs like ApichatpongWeerasethakul, Guillermo del Toro and Guy Maddin. It proposes that many of these works provide their own critical commentary on the ghost story itself.

Contemporary Vampires

This chapter tracks the trends of the contemporary vampire in the twenty-first century, from the vampire’s popular representation as an outsider and anti-hero, a carrier of a fatal plague, through to an idealised figure of desire in Gothic romance. Vampires in literature, film and television evidence their continued struggle as displaced figures caught between the ancient and the modern while remaining perfectly in tune with the zeitgeist. This chapter analyses the cultural assimilation and aggressive marketisation of the vampire narrative into separate strands for multiple audiences and generic configurations (from the Gothic romance to the action film), exposing the plurality of vampiric representation in the twenty-first century, including the tamed Gothic lover of the Twilight saga (2008–12), the ubiquitous and the synthetic nature of contemporary vampire society (HBO’s True Blood(2008–14)), and the persistent updating of popular twentieth-century vampire narratives, including Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula(1897), for a new century.

Postfeminist Gothic

This essay first moves rapidly through arguments about the end of feminism to refute optimistic blinkered versions, arguing that postfeminist Gothic consistently problematises complacencies about rights, cultures and bodies. Instead it offers flexible notions of ‘becoming’ woman, gives voice and body to the Other and radicalises representations of gender and gender-based identities, particularly in relation to (the horror of) heteronormativity (Halberstam 2007). Postfeminist Gothic emphasises contestation, through the haunting, continuation and morphing of familiar Gothic concerns and the figures which articulate them, including vampires, werewolves, zombies, serial killers and mermaids. It focuses on Sarah Waters’s The Little Stranger (2009) and The Paying Guests (2014); Angela Carter’s ‘The Loves of Lady Purple’ (1974); Nalo Hopkinson’s ‘The Glass Bottle Trick’ (2000); and variants of postfeminist Gothic in Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight series (2005–8; 2008–12) and Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997–2003). These postfeminist Gothic texts further arguments on Otherising, bodies, history and cultures in post-industrial society.

Postcolonial Gothic

Contemporary postcolonial Gothic provides a language for reengaging with the political realities of the post/neo-colonial present, speaking truths that are structurally repressed elsewhere,especially the lived realities of twenty-first-century postcolonial societies in the face of systemic violence and the structural exclusion of minority voices. This chapter explores how the irrealist aesthetics of twenty-first-century postcolonial Gothic function as critical commentary on the systemic failings of the contemporary moment, linking these failings to a history of colonisation, yet going further than the critique of colonial discourse or epistemology that predominated in twentieth-century postcolonial Gothic literature and criticism. The subgenre of postcolonial Gothic has evolved to encounter new contexts wrought by environmental disaster and resurgent nationalism that require action in the present in order to create a usable future, to address new racisms emerging from neo-imperial and nationalistic movements, and to repurpose new monsters suited to systemic critique.

Introduction: The Gothic in the Twenty-First Century

The establishment of the Gothic as one of the prevalent artistic modes of the post-millennial period is not something that could have been easily foreseen in the mid-twentieth century. For a long time relegated to specialist university units on Romanticism and Enlightenment literature, still heavily associated with medieval and revival architecture and certainly not in wide circulation as a term through which to describe contemporary cultural products, the Gothic underwent a seismic change during the 1980s and 1990s. The astounding effect of scholarly work, especially the pioneering books by ...