Gothicka

[Markekohut]

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and Pynchon's Gothic genius was prescient and encompassed the popular.

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On Sep 10, 2012, at 9:54 PM, Dave Monroe <against.the.dave at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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