Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
An ambitious work of cultural analysis ..., 14 Mar 1999
By A Customer
In his deceptively concise work on "angels, sadomasochism, and the culture of the gothic," Nightmare on Main Street (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1997), Mark Edmunson argues that, pace the late, great Carl Sagan, we do indeed live in a "demon-haunted world," albeit one haunted perhaps by demons of our own making. Edmundson's seductively convincing claim is that, two centuries down the line from the genre's origins, we have come to narrate our world through the conventions of gothic fiction. Not only our literature (horror, but also such works as Nobel laureate Tony Morrison's Beloved), our cinema (the slasher film, legitimated by the Academy Award given The Silence of the Lambs), but even our news is generically gothic (l'affaire O.J. Simpson). We--individually, socially, culturally--are haunted by psychology, ideology (cf. Terry Castle's "Phantasmagoria" in The Female Thermometer (NY: Oxford UP, 1995), as well as her claims for Ann Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho as a source of modern subjectivity, e.g., her introduction to the recent Oxford World Classics edition), and our resurgent gothicism is as much an epiphenomenon of millenial anxiety as its emergence was of the Terror of the French Revolution. Interestingly, however, Edmundson's own narrative takes typically gothic twist, doubling this evil twin with the "facile transcendence," as he quite rightly names it, of new age spiritualism, exemplified by the recent mania for angels and such middlebrow feelgood productions as Forrest Gump. While such tail-biting is somewhat problematic, Nightmare on Main Street is nonetheless an ambitious, suggestive, and, provisionally, convincing work of cultural analysis. Related works of interest include Harold Bloom's Omens of Millenium: The Gnosis of Angels, Dreams, and Resurrection (NY: Riverhead, 1996); Teresa Goddu's Gothic America: Narrative, History, and Nation (NY: Columbia UP, 1997); and the collection of essays/exhibition catalog, Gothic: Transmutations of Horror in Late Twentieth-Century Art, edited by Christoph Grunenberg (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998).
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1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Very aggravating book, 20 Oct 1998
By A Customer
This is a book I would recommend to be left on the shelf. Edmundson sees a society hurtling toward overt sadomasochism ans completely obsessed with the Gothic. His view is very narrow, and poorly supported. His opinion that Scar, from Disney's The Lion King, was a gay child molestor who killed Mufasa because of Simba's Oedipus complex is evidence that he does not truly know what he is talking about. If you are interested in a book full of pessimistic ideas and obscure references, by all means read this. If you would prefer a more complete explanation of a valid idea, try something else.
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by FRED BOTTING
by Catherine Spooner
by Catherine Spooner
by Kelly Hurley
by Catherine Spooner
