The Gothic Body

This book accounts for the resurgence of Gothic, and its immense popularity, during the British fin de siecle. Kelly Hurley explores a key scenario that haunts the genre: the loss of a unified and stable human identity, and the emergence of a chaotic and transformative "abhuman" identity in its place. She shows that such representations of gothic bodices are strongly indebted to those found in nineteenth-century biology and social medicine, evolutionism, criminal anthropology, and degeneration theory. Gothic is revealed as a highly productive and speculative genre, standing in opportunistic relation to nineteenth-century scientific and social theories.

First sentence: In William Hope Hodgson's "The Crew of the Lancing," an unnamed ship, sailing somewhere in the tropics, is becalmed after a submarine earthquake.

Year

1996

Language

English

Publisher

Cambridge University Press

Editions

7

Pages

216

ISBN

9780521607117

Data source: Wikidata