The Phantom of the Opera and Other Gothic Tales


Book Description

This classic collection features 25 tales shaped by gothic's mood of menace and the macabre. In addition to the world-famous title novel, the anthology includes Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto, which launched the gothic novel craze, as well as stories by H. P. Lovecraft, Edgar Allan Poe, Mary Shelley, Arthur Machen, Louisa May Alcott, E. T. A. Hoffmann, J. Sheridan Le Fanu, and Vernon Lee.




Phantom Heart


Book Description

A steamy YA romance inspired by Gaston Leroux's classic The Phantom of the Opera Seventeen-year-old Stephanie Armand doesn't believe in ghosts or spirits. Despite her six-year-old sister insisting a masked figure is hiding in her closet, and the rumors at school, Stephanie isn't convinced her father's latest renovation project--a crumbling Victorian mansion--houses the soul of a monster. So when the very charming (and paranormal-obsessed) Lucas Cheney takes an interest in both Stephanie and her notorious home, Moldavia, the supernatural and romantic activity escalates to an all-time high. But then there's Erik-- the dashing British boy, seemingly from another era, who's taken up residence in Stephanie's nightly dreams. A boy who may have something to do with the man in the mask, and the strange occurrences taking place at Moldavia.




The Phantom Twin


Book Description

A young woman is haunted by the ghost of her conjoined twin, in Lisa Brown's The Phantom Twin, a sweetly spooky graphic novel set in a turn-of-the-century sideshow. Isabel and Jane are the Extraordinary Peabody Sisters, conjoined twins in a traveling carnival freak show—until an ambitious surgeon tries to separate them and fails, causing Jane's death. Isabel has lost an arm and a leg but gained a ghostly companion: Her dead twin is now her phantom limb. Haunted, altered, and alone for the first time, can Isabel build a new life that's truly her own?




The Undergrounds of the Phantom of the Opera


Book Description

This is the most comprehensive analytical study ever done of The Phantom of the Opera in its many different versions from the original Gaston Leroux novel to the present day. It proposes answers to the question, 'why do we keep needing this story told and retold in the Western world?' by revealing the history of deep cultural tensions that underlie the novel and each major adaptation. Using extensive historical and textual evidence and drawing on perspectives from several theories of cultural study, this book argues that we need this tale told and reconfigured because it provides us ways to both confront and disguise how we have fashioned our senses of identity in the Western middle class. The Phantom of the Opera - in varying ways over time - turns out like the 'Gothic' tradition it extends, to be deeply connected to Western self-fashioning in the face of conflicted attitudes about class, gender, race, religious beliefs, Freudian psychology, economic and international tensions, and especially the shifting and permeable boundaries between 'high' and 'low' culture. This book should interest all students of the history of Western culture, as well as those especially fascinated by Gothic fiction, opera, musical theatre, and film.




A New Companion to The Gothic


Book Description

The thoroughly expanded and updated New Companion to the Gothic, provides a series of stimulating insights into Gothic writing, its history and genealogy. The addition of 12 new essays and a section on ‘Global Gothic’ reflects the direction Gothic criticism has taken over the last decade. Many of the original essays have been revised to reflect current debates Offers comprehensive coverage of criticism of the Gothic and of the various theoretical approaches it has inspired and spawned Features important and original essays by leading scholars in the field The editor is widely recognized as the founder of modern criticism of the Gothic




Neo-Victorian Gothic


Book Description

Preliminary Material -- The (Mis)Shapes of Neo-Victorian Gothic: Continuations, Adaptations, Transformations /Marie-Luise Kohlke and Christian Gutleben -- The Limits of Neo-Victorian History: Elizabeth Kostova's The Historian and The Swan Thieves /Andrew Smith -- Reclaiming Plots: Albert Wendt's 'Prospecting' and Victoria Nalani Kneubuhl's Ola Nā Iwi as Postcolonial Neo-Victorian Gothic /Cheryl D. Edelson -- Monsters against Empire: The Politics and Poetics of Neo-Victorian Metafiction in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen /Sebastian Domsch -- A Bodily Metaphorics of Unsettlement: Leora Farber's Dis-Location / Re-Location as Neo-Victorian Gothic /Jeanne Ellis -- Neo-Victorian Gothic and Spectral Sexuality in Colm Tóibín's The Master /Patricia Pulham -- 'Jack the Ripper' as Neo-Victorian Gothic Fiction: Twentieth-Century and Contemporary Sallies into a Late Victorian Case and Myth /Max Duperray -- Chasing the Dragon: Bangtails, Toffs, Jack and Johnny in Neo-Victorian Fiction /Sarah E. Maier -- Neo-Victorian Female Gothic: Fantasies of Self-Abjection /Marie-Luise Kohlke -- Epistemological Rupture and the Gothic Sublime in Slouching Towards Bedlam /Van Leavenworth -- Dead Words and Fatal Secrets: Rediscovering the Sensational Document in Neo-Victorian Gothic /Kym Brindle -- 'Fear is Fun and Fun is Fear': A Reflexion on Humour in Neo-Victorian Gothic /Christian Gutleben -- Contributors -- Index.




Contemporary Gothic Drama


Book Description

This ground-breaking volume is the first of its kind to examine the extraordinary prevalence and appeal of the Gothic in contemporary British theatre and performance. Chapters range from considerations of the Gothic in musical theatre and literary adaptation, to explorations of the Gothic’s power to haunt contemporary playwriting, macabre tourism and site-specific performance. By taking familiar Gothic motifs, such as the Gothic body, the monster and Gothic theatricality, and bringing them to a new contemporary stage, this collection provides a fresh and comprehensive take on a popular genre. Whilst the focus of the collection falls upon Gothic drama, the contents of the book will embrace an interdisciplinary appeal to scholars and students in the fields of theatre studies, literature studies, tourism studies, adaptation studies, cultural studies, and history.




Summer Sons


Book Description

Lee Mandelo's debut Summer Sons is a sweltering, queer Southern Gothic that crosses Appalachian street racing with academic intrigue, all haunted by a hungry ghost. Andrew and Eddie did everything together, best friends bonded more deeply than brothers, until Eddie left Andrew behind to start his graduate program at Vanderbilt. Six months later, only days before Andrew was to join him in Nashville, Eddie dies of an apparent suicide. He leaves Andrew a horrible inheritance: a roommate he doesn’t know, friends he never asked for, and a gruesome phantom that hungers for him. As Andrew searches for the truth of Eddie’s death, he uncovers the lies and secrets left behind by the person he trusted most, discovering a family history soaked in blood and death. Whirling between the backstabbing academic world where Eddie spent his days and the circle of hot boys, fast cars, and hard drugs that ruled Eddie’s nights, the walls Andrew has built against the world begin to crumble. And there is something awful lurking, waiting for those walls to fall. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.




The Perturbed Self


Book Description

By comparison of late nineteenth-century ghost stories between China and Britain, this monograph traces the entangled dynamics between ghost story writing, history-making, and the moulding of a gendered self. Associated with times of anxiety, groups under marginalisation, and tensions with orthodox narratives, ghost stories from two distinguished literary traditions are explored through the writings and lives of four innovative writers of this period, namely Xuan Ding (宣鼎) and Wang Tao (王韬) in China and Vernon Lee and E. Nesbit in Britain. Through this cross-cultural investigation, the book illuminates how a gendered self is constructed in each culture and what cultural baggage and assets are brought into this construction. It also ventures to sketch a common poetics underlying a "literature of the anomaly" that can be both destabilising and constructive, subversive, and coercive. This book will be welcomed by the Gothic studies community, as well as scholars working in the fields of women’s writing, nineteenth-century British literature, and Chinese literature.