The New Urban Gothic: Global Gothic in the age of the Anthropocene

Millette, Holly-Gale , Heholt, Ruth (ed.) (2020) The New Urban Gothic: Global Gothic in the age of the Anthropocene (Palgrave Gothic), Basingstoke. Palgrave Macmillan, 1pp.

Abstract

This collection examines millennial representations and serialisations of new forms of Gothic narrative. The stories we are now reading mark a particularly dystopian shift in Urban Gothic fiction – one the texts in this collection explore. Set in international locations that are often overwhelmed by their relationship with the past, with each other, and with their futures, The New Urban Gothic considers our millennial preoccupation with degeneration and haunting, and looks to a future of economic and ecologic collapse and ruin. Arguing that this sense of despair is global, particularly in relation to crises such as climate change, urban decay, and the divisions wrought by our contemporary economy, the texts explored in this collection discuss the new Gothic horrors and hauntings of a Globalised world. The proposed collection will examine the dark tales which are now being transmitted and received in new digitised, mediatised and socialised forms; texts that are streamed and Tweeted; shared on multi-player gaming platforms and incorporated by fan fiction response. The collection will also examine more traditional genres where dystopian stories of urban life are told, through literature, film and television texts. The essays in the collection explore how different locales of the urban inflect these tales and imbue them with a specific sense of place and space. Work in the collection suggests that there is a new direction in Gothic Studies, one that is grounded in the critical acceptance of the devastation that the human has wrought in its epoch – the Age of the Anthropocene.

That the Anthropocene is our current lived epoch, and it has been the subject of increasing attention since its acceptance by the earth sciences (GSA 2011, 9th of October – “Presidential Address”) in 2011. Since then it has been the focus of a great deal of scholarship in the humanities, cultural studies, art, digital media and literary studies. The era had its beginnings in the mechanisation and global trade of the industrial revolution of the nineteenth century, but the modern era’s digital revolution has, arguably, increased popular awareness and anxieties over the Anthropocene’s key tenets and queries about ecology, climate change, the nuclear age, crime, poverty, hunger and the irrevocable and dystopian effect that humans have had on our planet.

The essays in The New Urban Gothic link the idea of the Anthropocene to older Gothic tropes as well as those found in the new and emerging urban story-worlds of this era. Examining the different and shifting meanings that arise from contemporary fictions that use the legacy of Victorian Urban Gothic in their storytelling, the volume looks at the intersections of time, place, space and media in a Global context. This collection is distinctive in its discussion of the urban Gothic in a way that casts reflections and shadows on the age of the human and on the dissolution of ideas of progress, evolution and enlightenment.
This collection of essays is unique in its international reach and theoretical scope and should serve a wide educational and popular audience. As The New Urban Gothic may very well mark a critical turn in Gothic studies, we believe that it will also attract a millennial readership. This is especially so as essays have been chosen that engage with Gothic texts situated in as many different new-media forms as possible. Literature, film, televisual texts, animation, game-screen texts, social media, the Twittersphere, and narratives that are streamed online and in different formats are all given an equal platform in this collection. This diverse collection of essays on new Gothic story forms responds in a timely and innovative way to our post-millennial and post-industrial condition; exploring what is new in our New Urban Gothic story-worlds.

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Contributors

Author: Holly-Gale Millette

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