 Trade In this Item for up to £0.60
Trade in Contemporary Gothic (FOCI) for an Amazon.co.uk gift card of up to £0.60, which you can then spend on millions of items across the site. Plus, get an extra £5 when you trade in books worth £10 or more until June 30, 2012. Trade-in values may vary (terms apply). Find more products eligible for trade-in.
|
Frequently Bought Together
Product details
|
More About the Author
Product Description
Review
Why won't Goth die? In Contemporary Gothic, Catherine Spooner performs a critical vivisection of the Goth subculture aesthetic to isolate the reasons why it eternally resurfaces in marginal and mainstream contemporary culture. Cutting through the subculture's conventions and cliches, Spooner examines Goth's roots in the gothic literary tradition while deftly deconstructing some of the more visible examples of Gothic pervasiveness ... Spooner also eloquently demonstrates that even commercially marketed and consumed Goth culture provides a vital intelligent, critical counterpoint to the pop, sparkle and giggle of mass popular culture. Art Review ... if you're prepared to absorb more pop-cultural references than a Joss Whedon screenplay and you've always wondered what Nick Cave has in common with Corrie, then this is the set text for you. SFX Magazine engaging and accessible throughout ... Spooner's book offers a fascinating cultural snapshot of where Gothic is 'at' ...' - Cultural Sociology Contemporary Gothic is both scholarly and engaging; Spooner ably synthesizes critical work on the gothic of the past to generate a definition of its form and function at the present moment, and to shed light on the many corners of the culture in which we can catch the gothic lurking. Journal of American Cultures From mud brick classrooms to interior 'streets', this compact book (part of Reaktion's Objekt series) considers the form and function of the school. Remember that fusty old building? The authors ask how new technology and globalisation might affect 21st century notions of "school". RIBA Journal
Product Description
Gothic images pervade contemporary culture, from popular interior decorating programmes to news stories of vampire-obsessed killers. Darkness and unease have never been more fashionable, as the media repeatedly proclaims that Gothic is back', heralding its influence in film, music, style and popular culture. "Contemporary Gothic" seeks to analyse this trend. Why is Gothic perennially undergoing revival? What is its role in modern consumer culture? And is its popularity or its usefulness drawing to an end? "Contemporary Gothic" provides a sustained investigation of the role of Gothic in contemporary culture, from Buffy to Britart, theme pubs to advertising. It explores a wide range of recent material, including consumer products, fashion, fiction, film and art, within the context of a centuries-old literary and cultural tradition. Gothic walks a narrow line between comfort and outrage, mass popularity and cult appeal, the grotesque and the incorporeal, authentic self-expression and camp performance. Its very contradictions, Catherine Spooner argues, have made it so adaptable to contemporary concerns. Inventive and accessibly written, the book will appeal to students and academics researching Gothic across a wide range of disciplines, as well as general readers with an interest in the darker side of film, TV and fiction.
Inside This Book
(Learn More)
First Sentence
While Christmas shopping in 2002, I came across a shop in my local mall temporarily devoted to nothing but calendars. Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Back Cover
While Christmas shopping in 2002, I came across a shop in my local mall temporarily devoted to nothing but calendars. Read the first page
Explore More
Concordance
Browse Sample PagesConcordance
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Back Cover
Tags Customers Associate with This Product(What's this?)Click on a tag to find related items, discussions, and people.
|
Sell a Digital Version of This Book in the Kindle Store
If you are a publisher or author and hold the digital rights to a book, you can sell a digital version of it in our Kindle Store.
Learn more
What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?
Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
This is a long-awaited (at least by me) and very welcome book. In her previous study, 'Fashioning Gothic Bodies', Catherine Spooner looked at the transmutations of the Gothic mode through fashion and its representations in art and literature, making a fascinating if rather disjointed collection of essays. This work allows her to range much more freely over the whole field of modern Gothic, producing something accordingly more coherent and more satisfying to read, and better illustrated, too, than the previous more narrowly academic tome.
It's a great pleasure to find an academic analyst not trying to convince us that Gothic is 'about' any one thing in particular, but instead acknowledging its multifarious aspects, its ability to absorb and process conflicting ways of looking at the world, and its sheer perversity - and, in fact, ascribing to that much of its continuing power. The chapters on the wonderfully contradictory presentations of Goth and Gothic in 'Buffy', and Goths' self-representations through what they consume, are enormous fun. The slipperiness of Gothic makes it a hazardous field to traverse, but I find Spooner's analyses of widely-divergent cultural phenomena are insightful and incisive - the book seems almost completely free of that great academic vice, stating the obvious in impenetrably complicated language.
That's only the first lesson I hope her colleagues of the International Gothic Association will draw from this book. The second is the excitingly interdisciplinary approach Spooner takes to her subject, a subject which clearly demands it if any does. From high literature to trashy films to adverts to fashion to Gunter von Hagens, 'Contemporary Gothic' catches everything relevant in its net and makes something useful of it.
Of course with a cultural phenomenon as expansive as Gothic, any one book can only shine a light into a few darkling corners. I hope that in future Dr Spooner will be given a wider space to luxuriate in her subject and expose more of that distressing landscape; for now, this is a book which nobody lost in the winding corridors and echoing spaces of twenty-first century Gothic should be without.
It's a great pleasure to find an academic analyst not trying to convince us that Gothic is 'about' any one thing in particular, but instead acknowledging its multifarious aspects, its ability to absorb and process conflicting ways of looking at the world, and its sheer perversity - and, in fact, ascribing to that much of its continuing power. The chapters on the wonderfully contradictory presentations of Goth and Gothic in 'Buffy', and Goths' self-representations through what they consume, are enormous fun. The slipperiness of Gothic makes it a hazardous field to traverse, but I find Spooner's analyses of widely-divergent cultural phenomena are insightful and incisive - the book seems almost completely free of that great academic vice, stating the obvious in impenetrably complicated language.
That's only the first lesson I hope her colleagues of the International Gothic Association will draw from this book. The second is the excitingly interdisciplinary approach Spooner takes to her subject, a subject which clearly demands it if any does. From high literature to trashy films to adverts to fashion to Gunter von Hagens, 'Contemporary Gothic' catches everything relevant in its net and makes something useful of it.
Of course with a cultural phenomenon as expansive as Gothic, any one book can only shine a light into a few darkling corners. I hope that in future Dr Spooner will be given a wider space to luxuriate in her subject and expose more of that distressing landscape; for now, this is a book which nobody lost in the winding corridors and echoing spaces of twenty-first century Gothic should be without.
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
1 review
6 of 6 people found the following review helpful
the prevalence of the gothic in today's popular culture
8 April 2007
Format:Paperback
In this book on popular culture, Spooner writes about how "Gothic narratives have escaped the confines of literature and spread across disciplinary boundaries to infect all kinds of media, from fashion to advertising to the way contemporary events are constructed in mass culture." This is evident in the clothing worn by many punk-rock musicians, the prevalence of tattoos and body piercing, and the popularity of horror movies. But Spooner not only engages in an entertaining inventory of the diverse manifestations of the gothic in contemporary culture, but also delves into the historical and literary roots of the gothic and reasons for its attraction and persistence. In its idiomatic, inimitable way, the gothic represents the potent psychic themes of subconscious memories of the past and ties to the dead, the creation of the "other" (e. g. Frankenstein's monster), the fragmentary self, the mutability of the body, and one's own death and reincarnation. The gothic does not resolve anxieties "both personal and collective" attending these, however. Spooner's general perspective is that it is a way of dealing with the anxieties. The periodic reawakening of the gothic usually originate among younger people for its graphic imagery connoting unconventionality and a degree of rebelliousness. Spooner is a lecturer in literature at England's Lancaster University and author of the 2004 book "Fashioning Gothic Bodies." Her sure hand with the wide range of subject matter makes for an especially lucid exploration of the vein of the gothic in today's pop and youth cultures.
Was this review helpful?
Let us know
Customer Discussions
|
This product's forum
Active discussions in related forums
Search Customer Discussions
|
Related forums
|
Listmania!
|
|
Look for similar items by category
- Books > Art, Architecture & Photography
- Books > History > Cultural History
- Books > History > Other Historical Subjects
- Books > Poetry, Drama & Criticism > History & Criticism
- Books > Society, Politics & Philosophy > Social Sciences > Cultural Studies > Popular Culture
- Books > Society, Politics & Philosophy > Social Sciences > Sociology
Look for similar items by subject
Feedback
- Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
- I am the Author, and I want to comment on my book.
- I am the Publisher, and I want to comment on this book.
|
