This innovative book is the first to make an explicit link between constructions of the body in Gothic literature and film and historically specific fashion discourse, from the 1790s to the 1990s.

Modern Gothic culture alternately fascinates, horrifies, or bewilders many of us. We cringe at pictures of Marilyn Manson, cheer for Buffy in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and try not to stare at the pierced and tattooed teens we pass on the streets. But what is it about this dark and morbidly morose aesthetic that fascinates us today? In Contemporary Gothic, Catherine Spooner probes the reasons behind the prevalence of the Gothic in popular culture and how it has inspired innovative new work in film, literature, music, and art. Spooner traces the emergence of the Gothic subculture over the past few decades and examines the various aspects of contemporary society that revolve around the grotesque, abject, and artificial. The Gothic is continually resituated in different spheres of culture, she reveals, as she explores the transplantation of the “street” Goth style to haute couture runway looks by fashion designers. The Gothic also appears in a number of surprisingly diverse representations, and Spoonerconsiders them all, from the artistic excesses of Jake and Dinos Chapman to the fashions of Alexander McQueen, and from the mind-bending films of David Lynch to the abnormal postmodern subjects of Joel-Peter Witkin’s photography. In an engaging way, Contemporary Gothic argues that this style ultimately balances a number of contradictions—the grotesque and incorporeal, authentic self-expression and campiness, mass popularity and cult appeal, comfort and outrage—and these contradictions make the Gothic a crucial expression of contemporary cultural currents. Whether seeking to understand the stories behind the TV show Supernatural or to extract deeper meanings from modern literature, Contemporary Gothic is a lively and virtually unparalleled study of the modern Gothic sensibility that pervades popular culture today.

The gothic, particularly in its contemporary incarnations, is often constructed around largely disembodied concepts such as spectrality or the haunted. Body Gothic offers a counter-narrative that reinstates the importance of viscerality to the gothic mode. It argues that contemporary discourses surrounding our bodies are crucial to our understanding of the social messages in fictional mutilation and of the pleasures we may derive from it. This book considers a number of literary and cinematic movements that have, over the past three decades, purposely turned the body into a meaningful gothic topos. Each chapter in Body Gothic is dedicated to a different corporeal subgenre: splatterpunk, body horror, the new avant-pulp, the slaughterhouse novel, torture porn and surgical horror are all covered in its pages. Close readings of key texts by Clive Barker, Richard Laymon, Joseph D'Lacey, Matthew Stokoe, Tony White or Stanley Manly are provided alongside in-depth analyses of landmark films such as Re-Animator (1985), The Fly (1986), Saw (2004), Hostel (2005), The Human Centipede (2011) and American Mary (2012). Contents Introduction: From Gothic Bodies to Body Gothic Chapter 1 – Splatterpunk Chapter 2 – Body Horror Chapter 3 – The New Avant-Pulp Chapter 4 – The Slaughterhouse Novel Chapter 5 – Torture Porn Chapter 6 – Surgical Horror Conclusion: The Gothic and the Body Notes Works Cited Filmography

An intriguing scholarly investigation, not so much of the ways the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries articulated pain, but of the ways in which pain itself articulated the late eighteenth-century experience. Through analysis of novels, plays, and poems, the author explores the transition from sensibility as a sense of "selflessness" to Romanticism, which puts the self in the foreground as the mediating consciousness. His tightly focused discussion sets a starting point for further critical investigation of the subject.

Since antiquity, religious beliefs and practices have inspired many of the world’s greatest works of art. These masterworks have, in turn, fueled the imaginations of fashion designers in the 20th and 21st centuries, yielding some of the most innovative creations in the history of fashion. Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination explores fashion’s complex and often controversial relationship with Catholicism by examining the role of spirituality and religion in contemporary culture. This two-volume publication connects significant religious art and artifacts to their sartorial expressions. One volume features images of rarely seen objects from the Vatican —ecclesiastical garments and accessories—while the other focuses on fashions by designers such as Cristobal Balenciaga, Domenico Dolce and Stefano Gabbana, John Galliano, Jean Paul Gaultier, Madame Grès, Christian Lacroix, Karl Lagerfeld, Jeanne Lanvin, Claire McCardell, Thierry Mugler, Elsa Schiaparelli, and Gianni Versace. Essays by art historians and leading religious authorities provide perspective on how dress manifests—or subverts—Catholic values and ideology.

Revealing Bodies turns to the eighteenth century to ask a question with continuing relevance: what kinds of knowledge condition our understanding of our own bodies? Focusing on the tension between particularity and generality that inheres in intellectual discourse about the body, Revealing Bodies explores the disconnection between the body understood as a general form available to knowledge and the body experienced as particularly one's own. Erin Goss locates this division in contemporary bodily exhibits, such as Gunther von Hagens' Body Worlds, and in eighteenth-century anatomical discourse. Her readings of the corporeal aesthetics of Edmund Burke's Philosophical Enquiry, William Blake's cosmological depiction of the body's origin in such works as The First] Book of Urizen, and Mary Tighe's reflection on the relation between love and the soul in Psyche; or, The Legend of Love demonstrate that the idea of the body that grounds knowledge in an understanding of anatomy emerges not as fact but as fiction. Ultimately, Revealing Bodies describes how thinkers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and bodily exhibitions in the twentieth and twenty-first call upon allegorized figurations of the body to conceal the absence of any other available means to understand that which is uniquely our own: our existence as bodies in the world.

Vocals tinged with pain and desperation. The deep thuds of an upright bass. Women with short bangs and men in cuffed jeans. These elements and others are the unmistakable signatures of rockabilly, a musical genre normally associated with white male musicians of the 1950s. But in Los Angeles today, rockabilly's primary producers and consumers are Latinos and Latinas. Why are these "Razabillies" partaking in a visibly "un-Latino" subculture that's thought of as a white person's fixation everywhere else? As a Los Angeles Rockabilly insider, Nicholas F. Centino is the right person to answer this question. Pairing a decade of participant observation with interviews and historical research, Centino explores the reasons behind a Rockabilly renaissance in 1990s Los Angeles and demonstrates how, as a form of working-class leisure, this scene provides Razabillies with spaces of respite and conviviality within the alienating landscape of the urban metropolis. A nuanced account revealing how and why Los Angeles Latinas/os have turned to and transformed the music and aesthetic style of 1950s rockabilly, Razabilly offers rare insight into this musical subculture, its place in rock and roll history, and its passionate practitioners.