This book reveals how Gothic choir screens, through both their architecture and sculpture, were vital vehicles of communication and shapers of community within the Christian church.

Gothic as a form of fiction-making has played a major role in Western culture since the late eighteenth century. In this volume, fourteen world-class experts on the Gothic provide thorough and revealing accounts of this haunting-to-horrifying type of fiction from the 1760s (the decade of The Castle of Otranto, the first so-called 'Gothic story') to the end of the twentieth century (an era haunted by filmed and computerized Gothic simulations). Along the way, these essays explore the connections of Gothic fictions to political and industrial revolutions, the realistic novel, the theatre, Romantic and post-Romantic poetry, nationalism and racism from Europe to America, colonized and post-colonial populations, the rise of film and other visual technologies, the struggles between 'high' and 'popular' culture, changing psychological attitudes towards human identity, gender and sexuality, and the obscure lines between life and death, sanity and madness. The volume also includes a chronology and guides to further reading.

The primal image of the black-caped vampire Dracula has become an indelible fixture of the modern imagination. It's recognition factor rivals, in its own perverse way, the familiarity of Santa Claus. Most of us can recite without prompting the salient characteristics of the vampire: sleeping by day in its coffin, rising at dusk to feed on the blood of the living; the ability to shapeshift into a bat, wolf, or mist; a mortal vulnerability to a wooden stake through the heart or a shaft of sunlight. In this critically acclaimed excursion through the life of a cultural icon, David Skal maps out the archetypal vampire's relentless trajectory from Victorian literary oddity to movie idol to cultural commidity, digging through the populist veneer to reveal what the prince of darkness says about us all.

Gothic Heroines on Screen explores the translation of the literary Gothic heroine on screen, the potential consequences of these adaptations, and contemporary interpretations of the form. Each chapter illuminates the significance of this moving image mediation, relating its screen topics to their various historical, social, and geographical moments of production, while maintaining a focus on the key figure of the investigating woman. Many chapters - perhaps inescapably - delve into the point of adaptation: the Bluebeard story and du Maurier's Rebecca as two key examples. Moving beyond the Old Dark House that frequently forms both the Gothic heroine's backdrop and her area of investigation, some chapters examine alternative locations and their impact on the Gothic heroine, some leave behind the marital thriller to explore what happens when the Gothic meets other genres, such as comedy, while others travel away from the usual Anglo-American contexts to European ones. Throughout the collection, the Gothic heroine's representation is explored within the medium, which brings together image, movement, and sound, and this technological fact takes on varied significance. What does remain constant, however, is the emphasis on the longevity, significance, and distinctiveness of the Gothic heroine in screen culture.

The great Gothic cathedrals of Europe are among the most astonishing achievements of Western culture. Evoking feelings of awe and humility, they make us want to understand what inspired the people who had the audacity to build them. This engrossing book surveys an era that has fired the historical imagination for centuries. In it Robert A. Scott explores why medieval people built Gothic cathedrals, how they built them, what conception of the divine lay behind their creation, and how religious and secular leaders used cathedrals for social and political purposes. As a traveler’s companion or a rich source of knowledge for the armchair enthusiast, The Gothic Enterprise helps us understand how ordinary people managed such tremendous feats of physical and creative energy at a time when technology was rudimentary, famine and disease were rampant, the climate was often harsh, and communal life was unstable and incessantly violent. While most books about Gothic cathedrals focus on a particular building or on the cathedrals of a specific region, The Gothic Enterprise considers the idea of the cathedral as a humanly created space. Scott discusses why an impoverished people would commit so many social and personal resources to building something so physically stupendous and what this says about their ideas of the sacred, especially the vital role they ascribed to the divine as a protector against the dangers of everyday life. Scott’s narrative offers a wealth of fascinating details concerning daily life during medieval times. The author describes the difficulties master-builders faced in scheduling construction that wouldn’t be completed during their own lifetimes, how they managed without adequate numeric systems or paper on which to make detailed drawings, and how climate, natural disasters, wars, variations in the hours of daylight throughout the year, and the celebration of holy days affected the pace and timing of work. Scott also explains such things as the role of relics, the quarrying and transporting of stone, and the incessant conflict cathedral-building projects caused within their communities. Finally, by drawing comparisons between Gothic cathedrals and other monumental building projects, such as Stonehenge, Scott expands our understanding of the human impulses that shape our landscape.

It began in the 1800s. In the Texas town of Mineral Wells, people drinking the strange-tasting water claimed to be cured of insanity, rheumatism, and terminal illness. Discovery of the phenomenon beguiled thousands of tourists, curiosity seekers, and the afflicted who desperately sought cures. Yet, the town that promoted its “crazy water” attracted eccentric citizens, including wealthy Will and Anna Johnson, who, unable to cope with the deaths of their children, spared no expense in preserving the bodies for entombment in a mausoleum; paperclip inventor David Galbraith, the builder of a house in the shape of a honeycomb; and influential mortician Bob Beetham, who gained power by keeping the town’s secrets. In Texas Gothic, author James Pylant also uncovers the mysterious life of beautiful and ambitious Mineral Wells resident Corinne Griffith. After becoming a famous star of the silent screen and one of America’s richest women, she made a shocking courtroom claim that she was not the “real” Corinne Griffith. Under the looming 14-story Baker Hotel, Mineral Wells thrived with visits from movie stars; yet, the “crazy water” beckoned exploiters and predators. Texas Gothic reveals true tales of the town’s forgotten past: murder, white slavery, prostitution, and mysterious deaths.

This volume was first published by Interdisciplinary Press in 2012. The Gothic lives! From The Castle of Otranto to today’s Let Me In, the Gothic continues to be part of popular consciousness. Yet, even as it has adapted to fit changing times and technologies, it has retained both its essence and its hold on our imagination. What defines the Gothic? What are its parameters? This collection of essays, the work of scholars who met at the first-ever global conference on the Gothic, looks at the Gothic today—in print and other media including cinema, in music, in fashion, and in the popular culture of countries around the world. This volume of essays is another step in the process of understanding a genre that stretches the boundaries of definition and continues to make its way, adapting and changing along the way, into new aspects of modern culture.