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    Introduction: Graveyard gothic

    Parisot, E. and McAllister, David and Aldana Reyes, X. (2024) Introduction: Graveyard gothic. In: Parisot, E. and McAllister, David and Aldana Reyes, X. (eds.) Graveyard Gothic. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press. ISBN 9781526166319. (In Press)

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    Abstract

    This introductory chapter theorises the graveyard’s persistent appeal to Gothic writers, identifying it as a heterotopic space of intergenerational confrontation replete with supernatural potential. Readings of key texts from Gothic’s first wave establish the centrality of burial spaces to the emerging Gothic mode, from the funerary sculptures and tombside denouement of Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764) to the double-coded graveyards found in Gothic spoofs and satires. The accumulated layers of meaning that the graveyard accrues marks it as an example of what Michel Foucault, in ‘Of Other Spaces’ (1967), calls a heterotopia’: a space that is discursively ‘other’ due to its disturbing and transformative qualities. Here, the authors argue that the graveyard is a heterotopia characterised by temporal accumulation and discontinuity in which ideologies compete, become distorted, are repressed and re-emerge, transformed in and by different cultures and new media. It is this seemingly endless flexibility and relevance that have given the graveyard its enduring position as a key Gothic locale, and which necessitates both the cross-media and international approach that characterises this volume.

    Metadata

    Item Type: Book Section
    School: Birkbeck Faculties and Schools > Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences > School of Creative Arts, Culture and Communication
    Research Centres and Institutes: Nineteenth-Century Studies, Centre for
    Depositing User: David Mcallister
    Date Deposited: 22 Feb 2024 16:42
    Last Modified: 23 Feb 2024 14:23
    URI: https://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/eprint/51806

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