Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-p9bg8 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-29T01:29:55.240Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

3.14 - The Gothic in the Age of Neo-Liberalism, 1990‒Present

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 July 2021

Catherine Spooner
Affiliation:
Lancaster University
Dale Townshend
Affiliation:
Manchester Metropolitan University
Get access

Summary

Since the 1980s, the ubiquity of Gothic monsters across literary, filmic and televisual media indicates both a widespread need to give form to the amorphous forces that shape our lives under free market capitalism and an eschatological awareness of all that has been lost and destroyed by the dark energies of neoliberal economics. The Neoliberal Gothic, this chapter argues, adopts the conventions of the Gothic mode to indict the perpetrators of global misery while enabling us to think around our investment in the neoliberal status quo and imagine a better way of being in the world. The Neoliberal Gothic becomes, therefore, a means of both seeing and being other-wise, proffering both critique of the present and a roadmap to a future in which our cities do not lie in ruins and we do not feel hunted by dark forces that we have no power to resist. Texts under consideration include the television series: American Horror Story, (2011), Carnivàle (2003–5) and The Strain (2012–17); films Blade (1998) and Land of the Dead (2005); and Justin Cronin’s novels The Passage (2010), The Twelve (2012) and City of Mirrors (2016).

Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge History of the Gothic
Volume 3: Gothic in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries
, pp. 283 - 301
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2021

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×