Title: Gothic contemporaries : the haunted text /
Authors: Watkiss, Joanne.
Publisher: University of Wales Press,
Year: 2012
Subjects: Derrida, Jacques; Gothic fiction (Literary genre) Themes, motives.; English fiction History and criticism.
Abstract: This book is the first of its kind to align selected 21st century fiction with a revised understanding of the gothic. Through close reading, the author demonstrates how 21st century novels are reworking traditional ghost stories of the past. Themes explored are the links between memory and haunting; the architectural function of language; the uncanniness of writing; the Law and its associations with mortgage, death and hospitality; the poison of inherited lineage; the position of thresholds and traces of violence within space. -- Product Description.
Contents: Introduction: the horror of failed exchanges: signification, communication, ethics, death, inheritance and currency -- 1. H(a)unting the house: consuming Mark Z. Danielewski's House of leaves -- 2. The horror of miscommunication: The story of Lucy Gault -- 3. The Gothic double revised: memory, mourning and illegal twins in The sea -- 4. Conjuration, digestion, expulsion: the law of mourning in The gathering -- 5. An inherited poison: Hamlet, the castle of Otranto and Lunar Park -- 6. Gothic currency: mortgage, debt and exchange in Beyond black.