Goth: Undead Subculture (Paperback)

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• This item: Goth: Undead Subculture by Lauren M.E. Goodlad

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• Goth: Identity, Style and Subculture by Paul Hodkinson

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• Goth Chic: A Connoisseur's Guide To Dark Culture by Gavin Baddeley

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Goth: Identity, Style and Subculture by Paul Hodkinson 5.0 out of 5 stars (2)  £16.14

The Goth Bible: A Compendium for the Darkly Inclined by Nancy Kilpatrick 3.8 out of 5 stars (5)  £8.44

Goth Chic: A Connoisseur's Guide To Dark Culture by Gavin Baddeley 4.7 out of 5 stars (3)  £10.49

Contemporary Gothic (FOCI) by Catherine Spooner 5.0 out of 5 stars (1)  £9.07

Goth Culture: Gender, Sexuality and Style (Dress, Body, Culture) by Dunja Brill 4.0 out of 5 stars (1)  £16.14

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Review
"Goth: Undead Subculture is a very engaging read--a nice melange of ethnographic anecdote, cultural criticism, and historical analysis--in which a multidisciplinary crew of contributors analyzes an important and complex subculture through its fashions, music, dancing, literature, sexual practices, aesthetic ideals, theatrical displays, historical precedents, and ideologies." Robert Walser, author of Running with the Devil: Power, Gender, and Madness in Heavy Metal Music "Goth creates its distinctive way of life by appropriating materials from a vast array of cultural phenomena--post-punk music, gothic literary tradition, pre-Christian mythology, sexual nonconformity, aesthetic avant-gardes--all of which it adopts primarily as style. Goth style is thus both dizzyingly heterogeneous and instantly recognizable. It is hard to imagine a single book that could do this subculture justice; yet by assembling contributors from a range of disciplines and judiciously including many voices of subcultural participants themselves, Goth: Undead Subculture manages to depict, while also reflecting critically on, this subculture's enduring appeal. This collection will be the definitive work on its topic." Tim Dean, author of Beyond Sexuality "... [an] intelligent collection of writings ..."--Times Literary Supplement, 13 April 2007 "Highbrow analysis of the genre that credibility forgot."--QP Magazine, May 2007

Product Description
Since it first emerged from Britain's punk-rock scene in the late 1970s, goth subculture has haunted postmodern culture and society, reinventing itself inside and against the mainstream. "Goth: Undead Subculture" is the first collection of scholarly essays devoted to this enduring yet little examined cultural phenomenon. Twenty-three essays from various disciplines explore the music, cinema, television, fashion, literature, aesthetics, and fandoms associated with the subculture. They examine goth's many dimensions - including its melancholy, androgyny, spirituality, and perversity - and take readers inside locations in Los Angeles, Austin, Leeds, London, Buffalo, New York City, and Sydney. A number of the contributors are or have been participants in the subculture and several draw on their own experiences.The editors provide a rich history of goth, describing its play of resistance and consumerism, its impact on class, race, and gender, and its distinctive features as an 'undead' subculture in light of post-subculture studies and other critical approaches. The essays include an interview with the distinguished fashion historian Valerie Steele; analyses of novels by Anne Rice, Poppy Z. Brite, and Nick Cave; discussions of goths on the Internet; and, readings of iconic goth texts from Bram Stoker's "Dracula" to James O'Barr's graphic novel "The Crow". Other essays focus on gothic music - including seminal precursors such as Joy Division and David Bowie - and goth-influenced performers such as the Cure, Nine Inch Nails, and Marilyn Manson. Gothic sexuality is explored in multiple ways, from the San Francisco queercore scene of the 1980s to the increasing influence of fetishism and fetish play.Together these essays demonstrate that while its participants are often middle-class suburbanites, goth blurs normalizing boundaries even as it appears as an everlasting shadow of late capitalism.

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews   6 of 6 people found the following review helpful: 5.0 out of 5 stars Gothic Scholarship Discovers Goth, 5 Jul 2007 By  James Rattue (Surrey, England) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)    The best way of tackling a subject that sprawls across disparate academic disciplines is to engage the services of a collection of experts in the fields involved. Previous studies of Gothic have been either scattergun takes on the whole genre by generalists, or focused investigations of this or that topic, usually literature. Goth: Undead Subculture is the first to break the trend and, even more admirably, actually tries to do so from the viewpoint of the Goth-on-the-dancefloor. Of course, what you end up with is academics - mostly, there is the occasional exception - discussing their favoured topics, but a good few of them could be characterised, as Trevor Holmes so wonderfully puts it, as `a goth-identified subject [with] an interest in things horrific and gloomy, in a postromantic decadent aesthetic overdetermined by punk, in embodiment through gender transitivity'. There's a certain amount of that breathy Stateside academic-speak, but in actual fact most of the essays in this collection sparkle a good deal. In fact, Trevor Holmes's is a good instance of the collision between the personal and the subcultural with his account of life as, er, a professional dancer cavorting gothically in an LA gay club, morphing into a debate on the slipperiness of gothic gender generally. Kristen Shilt writes a lovely account of the Austin Faerielanders in their `liminal enclave', and Rebecca Schraffenberger owns up to her own Goth development. Throughout the book there seem to be two twin and allied efforts which set it apart from anything attempted before. Firstly, there's a serious intention to think, and discover where possible, exactly how `gothic' cultural products function in the Goth community, how they are used and processed in sifting and developing a sense of identity. Secondly, there's an openness to considering in that task all sorts of cultural products. We expect such interdisciplinary boldness of Catherine Spooner, also represented in the book (albeit by an old essay), but everyone has a go. Michael Bibby, for example, is a professor of English, but has a go at analysing the role of the post-punk band Joy Division in formulating early Goth, looking at their work (lyrics, production, music), stage performances, and visual image promoted through album artwork. This is more than he has any right to know about. This is marvellous, if you can do the work of ploughing through the four hundred intimidating pages. There is nothing that can really do justice to the fissiparous and contradictory beauty of modern Goth, but this book does better than anything to date. My only wonder is whether Goths themselves will welcome such microscopic analysis; at least it comes not-entirely from the outside. Comment Comment | Permalink | Was this review helpful to you? Yes No (Report this) Share your thoughts with other customers: Create your own review › See all customer reviews...		Search Customer Reviews Only search this product's reviews

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