The Gothic Research Unit
In the last decade, an increasing number of handbooks and critical studies have been published on the Gothic genre. In 2010-2015, Routledge published over 40 studies focused on the Gothic; in the last 5 years, 183 titles have been added to this list. Although the increasing interest in the hitherto marginalized genre of the Gothic is in itself a remarkable cultural phenomenon, most of the published handbooks focus on the English-speaking world, leaving aside other cultural and linguistic traditions with rich and interesting Gothic materials.
This group seeks to conduct research on the Gothic literary and cinematic genres from a transnational, cross-cultural, and interdisciplinary perspective. We consider the Gothic to have rich traditions that have been underexplored and have plenty to contribute to debates on Queer and LGBTQ+ studies, feminist studies, cultural theory, bio-politics, and the relation between fiction and techno-science, among others. By looking at the world from the peripheral standpoints of the “monstrous,” the abject, the dark, the uncanny, and the tumultuous, the Gothic offers a uniquely critical insight into modern societies.
In integrating literary studies, interdisciplinary perspectives, and digital humanities, this project seeks to cover and systematize Gothic materials that include not only classics of the Gothic literary genre, but also artistic practices that make use and influence this aesthetic, such as cinema, photography, comics, and music. The group will also focus on expanding scholarly knowledge of geographical and linguistic areas generally ignored by Anglophone critics, such as Latin America, The Caribbean, Asia, and Africa. In doing so, we expect to portray the Gothic as a complex phenomenon, and one that has the potential to offer critical multi-cultural portrayals of modern society and history. Our goal is to study these societal portrayals carefully, to organize a multi-cultural Gothic corpus that is respectful of the different linguistic, social, and geo-historical traditions, and to make this comprehensive knowledge available to the academic community and beyond.
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