Fred Botting
Autor(a) de Gothic
About the Author
Fred Botting is Professor English Literature and executive member of the London Graduate School at Kingston University, UK. He has written extensively on gothic fictions, and on theory, film and cultural forms. His current research projects include work on fiction and film dealing with figures of mostrar mais horror - zombies in particular - and on spectrality. mostrar menos
Image credit: Professor Fred Botting (Photo: Maryann McKay, US Embassy)
Obras por Fred Botting
Associated Works
Etiquetado
Conhecimento Comum
- Sexo
- male
Membros
Críticas
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Associated Authors
Estatísticas
- Obras
- 11
- Also by
- 1
- Membros
- 261
- Popularidade
- #88,099
- Avaliação
- 3.9
- Críticas
- 2
- ISBN
- 41
Botting starts his story with the Graveyard Poets of the early 18th Century who, with their images of death and night, were the precursors of the Gothic authors who would emerge later in the century. In the subsequent chapters, all the usual suspects are covered – Horace Walpole, Ann Radcliffe, Matthew “Monk” Lewis, William Beckford. However, space is given to relatively lesser-known purveyors of the Gothic including Regina Maria Roche and Sophia Lee.
Some books about the subject restrict themselves to the “English Gothic”. However, Botting provides a chapter on the transformation of the Gothic by American authors such as Charles Brockden Brown, Hawthorne, Poe and Melville. The book is also very good at explaining how, later in the 19th Century and in the first decades of the 20th, the Gothic was “diffused” into a number of other literary genres, including the sensation and crime novels. What was a new perspective for me was also the Gothic’s influence and/or presence in modernist works by T.S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf.
The 20th Century brought with it the rise of cinema and other media were Gothic sensibilities can manifest themselves beyond literature. This development is also addressed in the final chapters although, possibly because of the very vastness of the subject, the closing sections have a rather “rushed” feel to them. As a general introduction to the Gothic, however, this is hard to fault.
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