Manchester University Press Neoliberal Gothic: International Gothic in the Neoliberal Age

The explosion of interest in the gothic in recent years has coincided with a number of seismic political changes that have reshaped the world as we know it: the fall of the communist bloc, the revolution in information and communication technologies, the emergence of biotechnologies, the proliferation of transnational corporations and, since 2001, the US-led 'War on Terror'. Each is itself underscored by the rise to global predominance of economic neoliberalism. Neoliberal Gothic considers the ways in which this increased cultural visibility of the gothic attests to the mode's engagement with the most significant dynamics of our age. Through analysis of texts drawn from literature, film, television, theatre and the visual arts (ranging from Europe to South East Asia, Africa to North and South America) the collection examines the ways in which gothic texts have both represented and interrogated the global changes wrought by Neoliberal economics since the 1980s. In turn, the impact of such changes on the form and cultural function of the gothic itself is fully explored. In a period characterised by ecological devastation, economically driven warfare, financial collapse, and capitalism's designation of large swathes of the global population as being barely alive at all, this collection makes a timely, if self-reflexively political, contribution to the field of Gothic Studies. Neoliberal Gothic will be of interest not only to students of the gothic, or academics working in this field, but to anyone with an interest in the present moment, its politics, economics and cultural manifestations – in film, literature and on the television screen.