Rome's Gothic Wars, From the Third Century to Alaric
Late in August 410, Rome was starving, its residents were turning on one another, and, to make matters worse, the Gothic army camped at Rome's gates was restless. The Gothic commander was Alaric, a Roman general and barbarian chieftain. Leading an army that was short of food and potentially mutinous, sacking Rome was his only way forward. The old heart of Rome's empire fell to a conqueror's sword for the first time in eight hundred years.
Anyone lucky enough to have this volume sitting on their shelves has instant access to the recent thinking of a long list of scholars who have led the way in Gothic studies. The book is a veritable Baedecker's guide that ranges from the historical Goths of the third century to Stephen King in the twentieth century; that explores dimensions of Gothic through painting and cinema, as well as written texts; that roams across Europe and America as well as the British Isles. Punter himself contributes a concise but stimulating introduction.
Gothic literature covers a range of books and authors much wider than most people realize. From the origins of the movement in the 18th century to Charles Dickens to contemporary writers such as Stephen King, this A-to-Z guide to Gothic literature covers a vast array of works and writers from Britain, America, and other countries, as well as a variety of genres - novels, short stories, poetry, plays, and even a few influential films and works of art. The extensive Encyclopedia of Gothic Literature thoroughly examines this increasingly popular topic.
This historically grounded account of Gothic fiction takes issue with received accounts of the genre as a stable and continuous tradition. Charting its vicissitudes from Walpole to Scott, Watt shows the Gothic to have been a heterogeneous body of fiction, characterised at times by antagonistic relations between writers or works.
The Gothic mode, typically preoccupied by questions of difference and otherness, consistently imagines the Other as a source of grotesque horror. The sixteen critical essays in this collection examine the ways in which those suffering from mental and physical ailments are refigured as Other, and how they are imagined to be monstrous. Together, the essays highlight the Gothic inclination to represent all ailments as visibly monstrous, even those, such as mental illness, which were invisible. Paradoxically, the Other also becomes a pitiful figure, often evoking empathy.
