Jerrold E. Hogle and Robert Miles (eds)
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- January 2020
- ISBN:
- 9781474427777
- eISBN:
- 9781474465083
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474427777.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
Each essay in this collection, after the introduction, focuses on a particular kind of theory-Gothic relationship, every one of which has a history and each of which is still being explored in ...
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Each essay in this collection, after the introduction, focuses on a particular kind of theory-Gothic relationship, every one of which has a history and each of which is still being explored in enactments of the Gothic and of theory today. Rather than recounting how different schools of theory and criticism have viewed the Gothic, these chapters argue how Gothic and theory have defined and affected - and still define and affect -- each other in particular aesthetic, intellectual, and cultural realms. In each case, the Gothic is revealed as containing and inciting the very theoretical schemes and assumptions that have purported to explain it from particular perspectives. Hence the Gothic, as it has progressed across Western and world history, emerges as both a producer of what each school of theory promulgates and an active Gothic-izer of each scheme, thereby advancing the development of every theoretical enterprise in Gothic works. This approach allows each essayist to reflect from the perspective of 2018-19 on how a particular realm of theory has opened up forms of the Gothic to our understandings and to the wider possibilities of Gothic texts (broadly defined) as performers of "cultural work." But it equally enlists each of them to explain how those very openings are incipient in forms of the Gothic and how the Gothic can also question existing theoretical claims, challenge them, and reorient them.Less
Each essay in this collection, after the introduction, focuses on a particular kind of theory-Gothic relationship, every one of which has a history and each of which is still being explored in enactments of the Gothic and of theory today. Rather than recounting how different schools of theory and criticism have viewed the Gothic, these chapters argue how Gothic and theory have defined and affected - and still define and affect -- each other in particular aesthetic, intellectual, and cultural realms. In each case, the Gothic is revealed as containing and inciting the very theoretical schemes and assumptions that have purported to explain it from particular perspectives. Hence the Gothic, as it has progressed across Western and world history, emerges as both a producer of what each school of theory promulgates and an active Gothic-izer of each scheme, thereby advancing the development of every theoretical enterprise in Gothic works. This approach allows each essayist to reflect from the perspective of 2018-19 on how a particular realm of theory has opened up forms of the Gothic to our understandings and to the wider possibilities of Gothic texts (broadly defined) as performers of "cultural work." But it equally enlists each of them to explain how those very openings are incipient in forms of the Gothic and how the Gothic can also question existing theoretical claims, challenge them, and reorient them.
Without Mastery
Walter Pater
The Unexpected
The Political Archive of Paul de Man
Death-Drive
In Memory of Jacques Derrida
Philosophy and Post-structuralist Theory
Scandalous Knowledge
Texts
