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This book explores a number of Alan Moore's works in various forms, including comics, performance, short prose and the novel, and presents a scholarly study of these texts. It offers additional readings to argue for a politically charged sense of Moore's position within the Gothic tradition, investigates surreal Englishness in The Bojeffries Saga, and discusses the doppelganger in Swamp Thing and From Hell. Radical environmental activism can be conceived as a Gothic politics invoking the malevolent spectre of a cataclysmic eco-apocalypse. The book presents Christian W. Schneider's treatment of the apocalyptic in Watchmen and a reassessment of the significance of liminality from the Gothic tradition in V for Vendetta. It explores the relationship between Moore's work and broader textual traditions, placing particular emphasis on the political and cultural significance of intertextual relationships and adaptations. A historically sensitive reading of From Hell connects Moore's concern with the urban environment to his engagement with a range of historical discourses. The book elucidates Moore's treatment of the superhero in relation to key Gothic novels such as The Castle of Otranto and presents an analysis of the nexus of group politics and survival in Watchmen. The book also engages in Moore's theories of art, magic, resurrections, and spirits in its discourse A Small Killing, A Disease of Language, and the Voice of the Fire. It also explores the insight that his adaptations of H.P. Lovecraft, which are laced with heterocosms and bricolage, can yield for broader understandings of his forays into the occult.
and Snakes and Ladders , which were adapted into comics by Eddie Campbell and later collected as A Disease of Language . In these works Moore explores the relationship between alienating environments and minds pushed to the brink of madness by violence and fear. The notion that Moore draws much from the Gothic is supported by the fact that
This book establishes the basic proposals of the Origin, which constitute the opening phase. In both structural and linguistic terms, 'difficulty' becomes the dominant principle in Darwin's negotiation of the relationship in the text between self-criticism and assertion. The book explores the profound awareness on Darwin's part of the lack of a coherent genetic theory upon which to predicate the mechanism of natural selection. 'Difficulties on Theory' then initiates that process of extensive questioning which has led Fleming to speak of Darwin's unsurpassed 'instinct for truth-telling': 'has there ever been another scientist who included in his great book all the arguments against it that he could ever think of?' The book outlines these main 'difficulties' and then proceeds to confront two of them, the absence of visible transitional forms in nature and the origin and development of common organs in creatures of widely different habit. It focuses on taxonomy via the 'Mutual Affinities of Organic Beings' serves as an important reminder that the whole structure of the Origin might be viewed as a debate around human systems of classification as much as an attempt to give unmediated access to the true principles of development in organic life. The 'ingenious' Darwin, subtly aware of the linguistic balancing acts necessary for the representation of a highly speculative theory in the terms of empirical method and observation, is an important aid to our understanding of the particular form of the Origin.
, see ‘Alan Moore interviewed by Eddie Campbell’, Egomania , 2 ( 2002 ), 1–32 (pp. 18–22); reprinted in Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell, A Disease of Language (London: Knockabout Comics, 2010 ), pp. 109–40. 17 Alan Moore Spells It Out , interview with Bill
seriously, assimilating their consequences into his own theory of language development. 34 As we have seen, Muller's theory of language development accorded metaphor a powerful role, but, as Beer points out, it also played a degenerative role - Muller described it as a 'disease of language', whereby 'concrete' terms lost their original clarity and precision as they were passed unconsciously from generation to generation, accumulating variations in meaning and developing into systems of myth and religion. 35 Beer observes Muller finding the concept of natural selection in