Inhalt: | ‘At last we have a definitive guide to the marriage between contemporary women’s fiction and the Gothic, which gleefully plunges the romance plot into darkness and prises heroines away from constraining narratives in an endless series of reinventions from the Cartesque through to the post-colonial.’ - Marie Mulvey-Roberts, University of the West of England, UK This book revives and revitalises the literary Gothic in the hands of contemporary women writers. It makes a scholarly, lively and convincing case that the Gothic makes horror respectable, and establishes contemporary women’s Gothic fictions in and against traditional Gothic. The book provides new, engaging perspectives on established contemporary women Gothic writers, with a particular focus on Angela Carter, Margaret Atwood and Toni Morrison. It explores how the Gothic is malleable in their hands and is used to demythologise oppressions based on difference in gender and ethnicity. The study presents new Gothic work and new nuances, critiques of dangerous complacency and radical questionings of what is safe and conformist in works as diverse as Twilight (Stephenie Meyer) and A Girl Walks Home Alone (Ana Lily Amirpur), as well as by Anne Rice and Poppy Brite. It also introduces and critically explores postcolonial, vampire and neohistorical Gothic and women’s ghost stories 1.Introduction -- 2.Angela Carter: Living in Gothic Times -- 3.Margaret Atwood and Canadian Women's Gothic: Spite, Lies, Split Selves and Self Deception -- 4.Cultural Haunting: Toni Morrison and Tananarive Due -- 5.Postcolonial and Cultural Haunting Revenants: Letting the 'Right' Ones In -- 6.Testing the Fabric of Bluebeard's Castle: Postcolonial Reconfigurations, Demythologizing, Re-Mythologizing and Shape-shifting -- 7.Vampire Bites -- 8.Vampire Kisses -- 9.Ghostings and Hauntings: Splintering the Fabric of Domestic Gothic with Horror Houses, Stately Homes, Ghosts Behind Walls, Playroom Deaths, Women in Black, Little Strangers -- 10.Reviving, Revisiting and Mainstreaming Gothic |
