Reunited after their separate journeys, Pencil and Nickel encounter a new brand of aesthetic fascism when they enter a decaying industrial metropolis where beauty is shunned and ugliness is celebrated.

Transatlantic approach: This project explores British and American texts in conversation together. Use of archival materials, which is relatively unusual within Gothic studies, and even in literary studies more generally. A focus on poetry, drama, and periodical writing, genres that are often ignored in the study of the Gothic. A focus on women’s work (both on the labor of women and on texts by women). A focus on local Gothic (especially in Lowell and Manchester), with a connection to larger international trends of the genre.

Monster in the Closet is a history of the horrors film that explores the genre's relationship to the social and cultural history of homosexuality in America. Drawing on a wide variety of films and primary source materials including censorship files, critical reviews, promotional materials, fanzines, men's magazines, and popular news weeklies, the book examines the historical figure of the movie monster in relation to various medical, psychological, religious and social models of homosexuality. While recent work within gay and lesbian studies has explored how the genetic tropes of the horror film intersect with popular culture's understanding of queerness, this is the first book to examine how the concept of the monster queer has evolved from era to era. From the gay and lesbian sensibilities encoded into the form and content of the classical Hollywood horror film, to recent films which play upon AIDS-related fears. Monster in the Closet examines how the horror film started and continues, to demonize (or quite literally "monsterize") queer sexuality, and what the pleasures and "costs" of such representations might be both for individual spectators and culture at large.

British Identities, Heroic Nationalisms, and the Gothic Novel, 1764-1824 considers three interlocking developments of this period: the emergence of the Gothic novel at a time when national upheavals required the construction of a new nationalist identity, the Gothic novel's redefinition of heroes and heroism in that nationalist debate, and changes within class and gender as well as audience and author relations. The scope of this study extends beyond the confines of the novel proper to include chapbooks and illustrated redactions.

Reviews and analyses of over 5000 titles from the 1930s to date. ... Every comic of note from the past fifty years is included in this comprehensive guide to American comics. From the underground to children's comics, autobiography to fantasy.