Gothicka

[Dave Monroe]

The Gothic, Romanticism’s gritty older sibling, has flourished in
myriad permutations since the eighteenth century. In Gothicka,
Victoria Nelson identifies the revolutionary turn it has taken in the
twenty-first. Today’s Gothic has fashioned its monsters into heroes
and its devils into angels. It is actively reviving supernaturalism in
popular culture, not as an evil dimension divorced from ordinary human
existence but as part of our daily lives.

To explain this millennial shift away from the traditionally dark
Protestant post-Enlightenment Gothic, Nelson studies the complex arena
of contemporary Gothic subgenres that take the form of novels, films,
and graphic novels. She considers the work of Dan Brown and Stephenie
Meyer, graphic novelists Mike Mignola and Garth Ennis, Christian
writer William P. Young (author of The Shack), and filmmaker Guillermo
del Toro. She considers twentieth-century Gothic masters H.P.
Lovecraft, Anne Rice, and Stephen King in light of both their
immediate ancestors in the eighteenth century and the original
Gothic—the late medieval period from which Horace Walpole and his
successors drew their inspiration.

Fictions such as the Twilight and Left Behind series do more than
follow the conventions of the classic Gothic novel. They are radically
reviving and reinventing the transcendental worldview that informed
the West’s premodern era. As Jesus becomes mortal in The Da Vinci Code
and the child Ofelia becomes a goddess in Pan’s Labyrinth, Nelson
argues that this unprecedented mainstreaming of a spiritually driven
supernaturalism is a harbinger of what a post-Christian religion in
America might look like.

http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674050143