Graveyard Gothic

This collection of essays considers the significance of graveyards in Gothic literature, film, television and video games. The chapters incorporate discussion of Gothic texts from around the world, offering a compelling new account of the graveyard’s importance as a key location for Gothic art and culture. ‘Historically and culturally wide-ranging, Graveyard Gothic offers a scintillating scholarly unearthing of the multivalent site of the graveyard.'Professor Carol Margaret Davison, editor of The Gothic and Death (2017)‘Insightful and scholarly, this volume makes a major contribution to the understanding of cultural history.’Professor Andrew Smith, author of Gothic Death 1740-1914: A Literary History (2016)Graveyard Gothic examines the crucial role played by graveyards and other burial sites in Gothic literature, film, television and video games. The book includes seventeen specially commissioned chapters from key international scholars that explore the graveyard’s Gothic significance from the eighteenth century to the present day, ranging far beyond British culture and offering unparalleled historical and geographical scope.Chapters on key texts from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries frame the graveyard as a site of solace and metaphysical speculation that nevertheless exemplified the emerging Gothic mode by offering both supernatural potential and a reminder of the links between past and present. The book then traces the journey of the graveyard trope as it became more complex and spread across cultures, languages and continents throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Contributors focus on its role in war Gothic, YA novels, weird fiction, poetry and non-fiction prose, as well as a vast array of novels and audiovisual texts. Graveyard Gothic establishes the graveyard as a quintessential Gothic chronotope and, in the process, defines a new area of Gothic Studies. Graveyard Gothic is the first sustained consideration of the graveyard as a key Gothic locale. This volume examines various iterations of the Gothic graveyard (and other burial sites) from the eighteenth century to the twenty-first, as expressed in numerous forms of culture and media including poetry, fiction, TV, film and video games. The volume also extends its geographic scope beyond British traditions to accommodate multiple cultural perspectives, including those from the US, Mexico, Japan, Australia, India and Eastern Europe. The seventeen chapters from key international Gothic scholars engage a range of theoretical frameworks, including the historical, material, colonial, political and religious. With a critical introduction offering a platform for further scholarship and a coda mapping potential future critical and cultural developments, Graveyard Gothic is a landmark volume defining a new area of Gothic studies.