Graveyard Gothic

Graveyard Gothic examines the crucial role played by graveyards and other burial sites in Gothic literature, film, television and video games. This book includes seventeen specially commissioned chapters from key international scholars that explore the graveyard's Gothic significance from the eighteenth century to the present day, and ranges far beyond British culture to consider representations from the US, Mexico, Japan, Australia, India and Eastern Europe. It offers unparalleled historical and geographical scope and engages a number of theoretical frameworks, including the historical, material, colonial, political and religious. Chapters on key texts from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries frame the graveyard as a site of solace and metaphysical speculation that nevertheless exemplified the emerging Gothic mode by offering both supernatural potential and a reminder of the links between past and present. The book then traces the journey of the graveyard trope as it became more complex and spread across cultures, languages and continents throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Contributors focus on its role in war Gothic, YA novels, weird fiction, poetry and non-fiction prose, as well as a vast array of novels and audiovisual texts. Important chapters demonstrate how film and TV in particular were responsible for enduring visual tropes that still shape our sense of the graveyard's Gothic identity. With its vast geographical scope, the book is also able to reveal the graveyard as a space of both oppression and resistance in texts that depict colonial conquest and exploitation. With a critical introduction offering a platform for further scholarship and a coda mapping possible future critical and cultural developments, Graveyard Gothic establishes the graveyard as a quintessential Gothic chronotope and, in the process, defines a new area of Gothic Studies.