21st Century Gothic: il romanzo gotico nell'ultimo decennio

Il romanzo gotico nel primo decennio di questo nuovo secolo è il tema portante della raccolta saggistica 21st Century Gothic. Great Gothic Novels Since 2000, pubblicato dall’americana Scarecrow Press a cura di Danel Olson, insegnante al Lone Star College di Houston, in Texas, e già curatore della serie di antologie narrative Exotic Gothic apparse in tre volumi per la Ash-Tree Press.

Un percorso tra le nuove espressioni del gotico attraverso 53 saggi e articoli di noti e meno noti critici, esperti e autori di genere, da Darrell Schweitzer a David Punter fino a Lisa Tuttle, Reggie Oliver, Nicholas Royle o Steve Rasnic Tem, analizzando le opere più rappresentative scritte fra il 2000 e il 2010 fra La torre nera di Stephen King e The Darkest Part of the Woods di Ramsey Campbell, Il figlio del cimitero di Neil Gaiman e il Peter Straub di A Dark Matter, non senza passare per l’immancabile saga di Twilight in mezzo ai molti goticheggianti spunti del nuovo millennio.

La prefazione si affida a S. T. Joshi, in un corposo volume di circa 700 pagine dal costo tutt’altro che abbordabile – per confermare la regola delle edizioni accademiche sempre ad alto prezzo. Informazioni presso il sito web dell’editore, qui a seguito l’indice dei contenuti al completo:

Foreword – S. T. Joshi
Introduction – Danel Olson
From Asperger’s Syndrome to Monosexual Reproduction: Stefan Brijs’s The Angel Maker and its Transformations of Frankenstein – Jerrold E. Hogle
The Sleep of Reason: Gothic Themes in Banquet for the Damned by Adam L. G. Nevill – James Marriott
Beasts: Joyce Carol Oates and the Art of the Grotesque – Peter Bell
The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood as a Modern “Bluebeard” – Karen F. Stein
Death and The Book Thief by Markus Zusak – Steve Rasnic Tem
Cinematic Femme Fatales and Weimar Germany in Elizabeth Hand’s The Bride of Frankenstein: Pandora’s Bride – Marie Mulvey-Roberts
Ghosts in a Mirror: Tabitha King and Michael McDowell’s Candles Burning – Nancy A. Collins
Repositioning the Bodies: Peter Ackroyd’s The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein and Other Monstrous Retellings – Judith Wilt
Marvels and Horrors: Terry Dowling’s Clowns at Midnight – Leigh Blackmore
What We Hide Within Us: Thoughts on Albert Sánchez Piñol’s Cold Skin – Brian J. Showers
Michel Faber, Feminism, and the Neo-Gothic Novel: The Crimson Petal and the White – Mary Ellen Snodgrass
Shedding Light on the Gothic: Peter Straub’s A Dark Matter – Brian Evenson
Gothic Western Epic Fantasy: Encompassing Stephen King’s Dark Tower Series – Tony Magistrale
Wonder and Awe: Mysticism, Poetry, and Perception in Ramsey Campbell’s The Darkest Part of the Woods – Adam L. G. Nevill
Drac the Ripper: James Reese’s The Dracula Dossier, Consciousness Disorders, and Nineteenth-Century Terror – Katherine Ramsland
The New Southern Gothic: Cherie Priest’s Four and Twenty Blackbirds, Wings to the Kingdom, and Not Flesh Nor Feathers – Don D’Ammassa
Margot Livesey’s Eva Moves the Furniture: Shifting the House of Gothic – Tunku Halim
Fatal Women and Their Stratagems: Tanith Lee Writing as Esther Garber – Mavis Haut
A Monster Sensation: Victorian Traditions Celebrated and Subverted in Sarah Waters’s Fingersmith – Lisa Tuttle
Fairy Goth-Mothers: Maternal Wish Fulfillment in Kate Morton’s The Forgotten Garden – Walter Rankin
In Praise of She Wolves: The Native American Eco-Gothic of Louise Erdrich’s Four Souls – Danel Olson
Andrew Davidson’s The Gargoyle: Canadian Gothic – Karen Budra
The Perils of Reading: The Gothic Elements of John Harwood’s The Ghost Writer – James Doig
Making Fish Out of Men: Gothic Uncertainty in Gould’s Book of Fish by Richard Flanagan – Robert Hood
Raised By the Dead: The Maturational Gothic of Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book – Richard Bleiler
Death Comes in the Mail: The Relentless Malevolence of Joe Hill’s Heart-Shaped Box – Darrell Schweitzer
Vlad Lives! The Ultimate Gothic Revenge in Elizabeth Kostova’s The Historian – Danel Olson
Gothic New York in James Lasdun’s The Horned Man – Nicholas Royle
Economies of Leave-Taking in Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves – Laurence A. Rickels
Dread and Decorum in Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell – Douglass H. Thomson
Renovation is Hell, and Other Gothic Truths Deep Inside: Jennifer Egan’s The Keep – Danel Olson
Nancy Drew Goes Gothic? The Little Friend by Donna Tartt – Lucy Taylor
The Tyranny of Time and Identity: Overcoming the Past in Gregory Maguire’s Lost – Jason Colavito
“And That Was the Reason I Perished”: Trauma’s Transformative Potential in Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones – August Tarrier
Deadly Words: The Gothic Slumber Song of Chuck Palahniuk’s Lullaby – Sue Zlosnik
His Dark Materials: Gothic Resurrections and Insurrections in Patrick McGrath’s Martha Peake – Carol Margaret Davison
The Vigilante in Michael Cox’s The Meaning of Night: A Confession – Heather L. Duda
London Demons: Cursed, Trapped, and Haunted in William Heaney’s (Graham Joyce’s) Memoirs of a Master Forger – K. A. Laity
Haunting Voices, Haunted Text: Toni Morrison’s A Mercy – Ruth Bienstock Anolik
Borderline Gothic: Phil Rickman and the Merrily Watkins Series – John Whitbourn
Narrative and Regeneration: The Monsters of Templeton by Lauren Groff – Graham Joyce
Educating Kathy: Clones and Other Creatures in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go – Glennis Byron e Linda Ogston
Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men: Western Gothic – Deborah Biancotti
Jeffrey Ford’s The Portrait of Mrs. Charbuque: A Picturesque Terror – Charles Tan
Gothic Maternity: The Pumpkin Child by Nancy A. Collins – Karin Beeler
Natsuo Kirino’s Real World: Murder and the Grotesque through Teenage Eyes – Edward P. Crandall
The Longest Gothic Goodbye in the World: Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events – Danel Olson
A Labyrinth of Mirrors: Carlos Ruiz Zafón’s The Shadow of the Wind – Romana Cortese e James Cortese
An Icy Allegory of Cultural Survival: Gothic Themes in Dan Simmons’s The Terror – Van Piercy
Are They All Horrid? Diane Setterfield’s The Thirteenth Tale and the Validity of Gothic Fiction
Snakes, Bulls, and the Preoccupations of History: Alan Garner’s Thursbitch – David Punter
Gothic, Romantic, or Just Sadomasochistic? Gender and Manipulation in Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight Saga – June Pulliam
Shaggy Dog Stories: Jonathan Carroll’s White Apples as Unconventional Afterlife Fantasy – Bernice M. Murphy – Reggie Oliver

21st Century Gothic. Great Gothic Novels Since 2000
a cura di Danel Olson
The Scarecrow Press, 2010
copertina rigida, 710 pagine, $75.00
ISBN 9780810877283

Andrea Bonazzi