The Gothic and Twenty-First-Century American Popular Culture examines the gothic mode deployed in a variety of texts that touch upon inherently US American themes, demonstrating its versatility and ubiquity across genres and popular media. The volume is divided into four main thematic sections, spanning representations related to ethnic minorities, bodily monstrosity, environmental anxieties, and haunted technology. The chapters explore both overtly gothic texts and pop culture artifacts that, despite not being widely considered strictly so, rely on gothic strategies and narrative devices.

The essays in this volume reinterpret and contest the Gothic cultural inheritance, each from a specifically twenty-first century perspective. Most are based on papers delivered at a conference held, appropriately, in Horace Walpoleʼs Gothic mansion at Strawberry Hill in West London, which is usually seen as the geographical origin of the first, but not the last, of the many Gothic revivals of the past 300 years. In a contemporary context, the Gothic sensibility could be seen as a mode particularly applicable to the frightening instability of the world in which we find ourselves at the beginning of the twenty-first century. The truth is probably less epochal: that Gothic never went away (when were we ever without fear?), or at least has persisted since its resurgence in the late nineteenth century. Gothic is at least as modern as it is ancient, and each essay in this collection contributes to current scholarship on the Gothic by exploring a particular aspect of Gothic’s contemporaneity. The volume contains papers on horror novels and cinema, poetry, popular music and fan cultures.

The first sustained examination of the depiction of American suburbia in gothic and horror films, television and literature from 1948 to the present day. Beginning with Shirley Jackson's The Road Through the Wall , Murphy discusses representative texts from each decade, including I Am Legend , Bewitched , Halloween and Desperate Housewives .

This interdisciplinary collection brings together world leaders in Gothic Studies, offering dynamic new readings on popular Gothic cultural productions from the last decade. Topics covered include, but are not limited to: contemporary High Street Goth/ic fashion, Gothic performance and art festivals, Gothic popular fiction from Twilight to Shadow of the Wind, Goth/ic popular music, Goth/ic on TV and film, new trends like Steampunk, well-known icons Batman and Lady Gaga, and theorizations of popular Gothic monsters (from zombies and vampires to werewolves and ghosts) in an age of terror/ism.

A new critical companion to the Gothic traditions of American CultureThis new Companion surveys the traditions and conventions of the dark side of American culture its repressed memories, its anxieties and panics, its fears and horrors, its obsessions and paranoias. Featuring new critical essays by established and emerging academics from a range of national backgrounds, this collection offers new discussions and analyses of canonical and lesser-known texts in literature and film, television, photography, and video games. Its scope ranges from the earliest manifestations of American Gothic traditions in frontier narratives and colonial myths, to its recent responses to contemporary global events. Key Features Features original critical writing by established and emerging scholarsSurveys the full range of American Gothic, from its earliest texts to 21st Century worksIncludes critical analyses of American Gothic in new media and technologiesWill establish new benchmarks for the critical understanding of American Gothic traditions

"This resource in contemporary Gothic literature, film, and television takes a thematic approach, providing insights into the many forms the Gothic has taken in the twenty-first century"--