Difficult pasts

This book develops insights into the vexed question of Carter's textual practices through the dusty lens of the Gothic. It argues that European Gothic is vital to illuminating and understanding the tension between politics and aesthetics in Carter's work. The book shows how a more concerted focus on Carter's European literary inheritance sheds light on her particular and perverse engagements with androcentric literary and cultural frameworks. It emblematises the tension between her textual extravagancies and her self-declared 'absolute and committed materialism'. Her firm belief 'that this world is all that there is, and in order to question the nature of reality one must move from a strongly grounded base in what constitutes material reality'. The book examines the fraught relationship between Carter's sexual and textual politics. Exploring the ways in which Carter's work speaks to broader discussions about the Gothic and its representations, the book is especially concerned with analysing her textual engagements with a male-authored strand of European Gothic. This is a dirty lineage that can be mapped from the Marquis de Sade's obsession with desecration and defilement to surrealism's violent dreams of abjection. The book not only situates Carter as part of a European Gothic tradition but theoretically aligns her with what Jane Gallop, in her book on Sade, describes as France's "deconstructive" feminism, daughter of antihumanism.

The late twentieth century saw growing number of articles and books appearing on new national gothic; however, the wider context for this had not really been addressed. This collection of essays explores an emerging globalgothic useful for all students and academics interested in the gothic, in international literature, cinema, and cyberspace, presenting examples of globalgothic in the 21st-century forms. It analyses a global dance practice first performed in Japan, Ankoku butoh, and surveys the ways in which Indigenous cultures have been appropriated for gothic screen fictions. To do this, it looks at the New Zealand television series on Maori mythologies, Mataku. The unlocated 'vagabonds' of Michel Faber's "The Fahrenheit Twins" are doubles (twins) of a gothic trajectory as well as globalgothic figures of environmental change. The book considers the degree to which the online vampire communities reveal cultural homogenisation and the imposition of Western forms. Global culture has created a signature phantasmagoric spatial experience which is uncanny. Funny Games U.S. (2008) reproduces this process on the material level of production, distribution and reception. The difference between the supposedly 'primitive' local associated with China and a progressive global city associated with Hong Kong is brought out through an analysis of cannibal culture. In contemporary Thai horror films, the figure of horror produced is neither local nor global but simultaneously both. The book also traces the development, rise and decline of American gothic, and looks at one of the central gothic figures of the twenty-first century: the zombie.

Academic analyses in cultural studies of the second half of the twentieth century had made a case to extend the term 'culture' to the tastes, practices and creativity of the groups marginalised by ethnicity and class. This book deals with Shakespeare's role in contemporary culture in twenty-first-century England. It looks in detail at the way that Shakespeare's plays inform modern ideas of cultural value and the work required to make Shakespeare part of modern culture. The book shows how advocacy for Shakespeare's universal and transcendent values deal with multiple forms of 'Shakespeare' in the present and the past. His plays have the potential to provide a tangible proxy for value that may stabilise the contingency and uncertainty that attends the discussion of both value and culture in the twenty-first century. The book shows how the discussions of culture involve both narratives of cultural change and ways of managing the knowledge in order to arrive at definitions of culture as valuable. It examines the new languages of value proffered by the previous Labour government in the first decade of the twenty-first century. The book further shows how both the languages and the practice of contemporary cultural policy have been drastically affected by economic pressures and the political changes occasioned by the post-2008 fiscal crisis.