This book brings together fourteen of the most ambitious and thought-provoking recent essays by David Punter, who has been writing on the Gothic for over thirty years. Punter addresses developments in Gothic writing and Gothic criticism since the mid-eighteenth century, by isolating and discussing specific themes and scenarios that have remained relevant to literary and philosophical discussion and by paying close attention to the motifs, figures, and recurrences that loom large in twenty-first-century engagements with the Gothic. Demonstrating an astounding breadth of erudition by a scholar at the top of his field, The Gothic Condition both engages deeply with Gothic history and examines our continuing fascination with Gothic tropes—the vampire, the zombie, the phantom, and the living dead.
288 pages | 5 1/2 x 8 1/2 | © 2016
Literature and Literary Criticism: General Criticism and Critical Theory
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Phantoms of Theory
1) Spectrality: The Ghosting of Theory
Fables of History
2) Francis Latham in the Eighteenth Century
3) Types of Tyranny
Sciences of the Strange
4) Pseudo-Science and the Creation of Monsters
5) Technogenealogies: Family Secrets
6) The Abhuman Remains of the Gothic
7) 'A Foot is What Fits the Shoe': Gothic, Disability
and Prosthesis
Some Humans, Some Monstrosities
8) M. R. James: Terror and History
9) Dark and Light Rays: The Penetration of
the Body
10) Of Monsters and Animals
Global, Local, War
11) Cyborgs, Borders and Stories for Virgins: Mexico
and the Gothic 161
12) Heart Lands: Contemporary Scottish Gothic
Last Things
13) Grievous Bodily Harm
14) Thoughts on Teaching Psychoanalysis
and the Gothic
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Introduction
Phantoms of Theory
1) Spectrality: The Ghosting of Theory
Fables of History
2) Francis Latham in the Eighteenth Century
3) Types of Tyranny
Sciences of the Strange
4) Pseudo-Science and the Creation of Monsters
5) Technogenealogies: Family Secrets
6) The Abhuman Remains of the Gothic
7) 'A Foot is What Fits the Shoe': Gothic, Disability
and Prosthesis
Some Humans, Some Monstrosities
8) M. R. James: Terror and History
9) Dark and Light Rays: The Penetration of
the Body
10) Of Monsters and Animals
Global, Local, War
11) Cyborgs, Borders and Stories for Virgins: Mexico
and the Gothic 161
12) Heart Lands: Contemporary Scottish Gothic
Last Things
13) Grievous Bodily Harm
14) Thoughts on Teaching Psychoanalysis
and the Gothic
Notes
Bibliography
Index