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The California Gothic in Fiction and Film
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Book Presentation:
Focuses on the California Gothic in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries
• Analyses the key historical events and cultural and social factors which have shaped Californian identity and found expression in horror and Gothic narratives
• Considers contributors to the California Gothic canon, such as: Nathanael West, Clark Ashton Smith, Shirley Jackson, Fritz Leiber, Joan Didion, Richard Matheson and Dave Eggers
• Reconsiders key films in relation to their previously overlooked ‘California Gothic’ significance: including Messiah of Evil (1973), The Fog (1980), The Lost Boys (1987), Sunset Boulevard (1950), Ravenous (1999), Starry Eyes (2014), The Neon Demon (2016), The Invitation (2015), Desierto (2015), Winchester (2018) and Us (2019)
• Draws upon the work of California historians and cultural commentators such as Kevin Starr, Mike Davis, Reyner Banham, Joan Didion, Philip Fradkin, Rebecca Solnit and Benjamin Madeley
This book positions the ‘California Gothic’ as a highly significant regional subgenre which articulates anxieties specific to the historical, cultural and geographical characteristics of the ‘Golden State’. California has long been perceived as a utopian space, but it is also haunted by the spectres of European and Anglo-American imperialism, genocide, racial and economic discrimination, natural disaster and aggressive infrastructural and commercial development. Drawing on the work of California historians and cultural commentators, this study explores the ways in which the nightmarish flipside of the ‘California Dream’ has been depicted within horror and Gothic.
About the Author:
Bernice M. Murphy is an Associate Professor and Lecturer in Popular Literature in the School of English, Trinity College, Dublin. She has published extensively on topics related to American Gothic and horror fiction and film and was recently academic consultant to The Letters of Shirley Jackson (2021, edited by Laurence Jackson Hyman). Bernice was made a Fellow of Trinity College Dublin in 2017.
Press Reviews:
California Gothic is a brilliant, insightful and richly historical book, one that will jolt you into awareness of the glaring omission (until now) of California from the American Gothic. It offers figures that take their rightful place in the Gothic canon – the ‘Fallen Star’ of the ’Hollywood Gothic’ and the ‘California Cult’ – and delivers the most innovative intervention into Gothic criticism in years.
– Dawn Keetley, Lehigh University
See the publisher website: Edinburgh University Press
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