The Gothic in Contemporary Literature and Popular Culture ─ Pop Goth

Looking at the Gothic and popular culture, this volume interrogates Gothic cultural manifestations from the first decade of this millennium and considers the fact that cultural productions associated with the gothic continue to thrive in popularity. Although it has always been associated with the popular, the Gothic in contemporary consumer culture contravenes the borders of genre, form, and media, having been commodified in all forms of cultural production: TV, young-adult novels, popular music, big-budget movies, and beyond. This interdisciplinary collection of essays by world leaders in Gothic Studies offers dynamic new readings of a diverse range of popular Gothic cultural productions, covering topics such as contemporary High Street Goth/ic fashion, Gothic performance and fan cultures, Gothic popular fiction from Twilight to Shadow of the Wind, Goth/ic popular music, on-line communities, Goth/ics on TV and film, as well as new theorizations of pop goth monsters (from zombies and vampires to werewolves and ghosts) in an age of terror/ism. Essays explore the fact that if the Gothic monster once served as a trope for racial, sexual, or cultural Otherness, then the ubiquity of the Gothic figure in contemporary popular culture breaks down conventional conceptions of human and monster, self and Other. In the 21st century, the Gothic is not just an aesthetic, textual, or visual form, but it is also something that is acted out, lived, and performed.

Justin D Edwards is Professor of English at the University of Surrey.

Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet is Professor of American Literature at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland.