London Gothic: place, space and the Gothic imagination

204 Pages·2012·1.252 MB·English

by  Phillips, Lawrence

London Gothic:
Place, Space and the Gothic Imagination
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Also available from Continuum
London Narratives, Lawrence Phillips
Recalling London, Alex Murray
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London Gothic:
Place, Space and the Gothic
Imagination
Edited by
Lawrence Phillips and Anne Witchard
Continuum Literary Studies
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Continuum International Publishing Group
The Tower Building 80 Maiden Lane
11 York Road Suite 704
London, SE1 7NX New York, NY 10038
www.continuumbooks.com
© Lawrence Phillips and Anne Witchard and contributors 2010
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted
in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying,
recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission
in writing from the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN: 978-1-4411-0682-7 (hardcover)
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.
Typeset by Newgen Imaging Systems Pvt Ltd, Chennai, India
Printed and bound in Great Britain by the MPG Books Group
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Contents
List of Illustrations vii
Notes on Contributors viii
Chapter 1 Introduction 1
Anne Witchard and Lawrence Phillips
Part One: Victorians to Moderns
Chapter 2 Toward a Phenomenology of Urban Gothic:
The Example of Dickens 9
Julian Wolfreys
Chapter 3 ‘A Fatal Freshness’: Mid-Victorian Suburbophobia 23
Anne Witchard
Chapter 4 ‘A City of Nightmares’: Suburban Anxiety
in Arthur Machen’s London Gothic 41
Amanda Mordavsky Caleb
Chapter 5 An Occult Gazetteer of Bloomsbury:
An Experiment in Method 50
Roger Luckhurst
Part Two: Contemporary Prose Narratives
Chapter 6 ‘This Light was Pale and Ghostly’: Stewart Home,
Horror and the Gothic Destruction of ‘London’ 65
Alex Murray
Chapter 7 ‘[T]hat Eventless Realm’: Hilary Mantel’s Beyond Black
and the Ghosts of the M25 80
Catherine Spooner
Chapter 8 ‘Where The Evil Is’: The London of Derek Raymond 91
Nick Freeman
Chapter 9 Rats, Floods and Flowers: London’s Gothicized Nature 103
Jenny Bavidge
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vi Contents
Part Three: Sites, Performance and Film
Chapter 10 Gog and Magog: Guardians of the City 121
J. S. Mackley
Chapter 11 ‘West End Ghosts and Southwark Horrors’:
London’s Gothic Tourism 140
Emma McEvoy
Chapter 12 Zombie London: Unexceptionalities of the
New World Order 153
Fred Botting
Chapter 13 What Lies Beneath: The London Underground and
Contemporary Gothic Film Horror 172
Lawrence Phillips
Index 183
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List of Illustrations
Chapter 3
Figure 3.1 London going out of town - or - the march of bricks and mortar! (1829) by
George Cruikshank
Chapter 10
Figure 10.1 Gog c. 1920. Courtesy of the London Metropolitan Archives
Figure 10.2 Magog. Courtesy of the London Metropolitan Archives
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Notes on Contributors
Jenny Bavidge is Lecturer in English at the University of Greenwich. She has
published on various aspects of children’s literature and children’s geogra-
phies, alongside work on urban theory and contemporary London writing.
Fred Botting is Professor of English at the University of Lancaster. He is the
author of Gothic (Routledge, 1996), Sex, Machines and Navels (Manchester Uni-
versity Press, 1999), and with Scott Wilson, The Tarantinian Ethics (Sage, 2001),
and Bataille (Palgrave, 2001), as well as the co-editor of Gothic: Critical Concepts
in Literary and Cultural Studies, 4 vols (Routledge, 2004).
Amanda Mordavsky Caleb is a lecturer at the University of Tennessee. She is the
editor of (Re)creating Science in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge: Scholars
Publishing, 2007), and is currently working on a monograph which considers
the intersection of decadence and science at the fi n de siècle. Her primary
research interests lie in the interdisciplinary study of science and literature.
Nick Freeman is a Senior Lecturer in English in the Department of English and
Drama, Loughborough University. He has published widely on Victorian and
twentieth-century literature and cultural history, with recent articles on Edward
Thomas, Somerset Maugham, E. Nesbit, and the ‘Raffl es’ stories of E. W. Hornung.
He is also the author of Conceiving the City: London, Literature, and Art 1870–1914
(Oxford University Press, 2007).
Roger Luckhurst is Professor in Modern and Comparative Literature at Birkbeck
College, University of London and is the author of books on science fi ction and
the history of science. His current project is an investigation of the British
Museum mummy curse.
J. S. Mackley teaches at the University of Northampton. His research and pub-
lication interests include the medieval perception and reception of apocryphal
legends, British mythology and folklore, and Medieval astronomy and cosmog-
raphy. He is the author of The Legend of Brendan: A Comparative Study of the
Latin And Anglo-Norman Versions (Leiden, Brill: 2008), has written articles on
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Notes on Contributors ix
the medieval legend of Judas Iscariot and is currently editing and translating a
fourteenth-century treatise on cosmography.
Emma McEvoy is Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Westminster,
London. She co-edited the Routledge Companion to the Gothic with Catherine
Spooner and contributed essays on ‘Gothic and the Romantics’ and ‘Contem-
porary Gothic Theatre’ to the volume. She has also published work on J. Meade
Falkner, G. K. Chesterton, Mary Shelley, Ann Radcliffe, Nick Cave, the Picturesque
and Gothic Music in Film. She provided the introduction and notes for the
Oxford University Press World’s Classics edition of Matthew Lewis’s The Monk
(1995). Beginning Gothic, co-written with Catherine Spooner, is forthcoming.
Alex Murray is Lecturer in English at the University of Exeter. He is the author
of Recalling London (Continuum, 2007) and editor, with Nick Heron and Justin
Clemens, of The Work of Giorgio Agamben (Edinburgh, 2008).
Lawrence Phillips is Reader in English at the University of Northampton. His
recent books include London Narratives: Post War Fiction and the City (Contin-
uum, 2006) and as editor, A Mighty Mass of Brick and Smoke: Edwardian and Victo-
rian Representations of London (Rodopi, 2007), and The Swarming Streets:
Twentieth-Century Representations of London (Rodopi, 2004). He is the founding
editor of the journal Literary London: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Representation
of London (ISSN 1744-0807).
Catherine Spooner is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at Lancaster
University, UK. She is the author of Fashioning Gothic Bodies (2004), Contemporary
Gothic (2006) and the co-editor, with Emma McEvoy, of the Routledge Companion
to Gothic (2007). She is currently working on a series of essays on twenty-fi rst
century Gothic, Gothic geographies, and literature and fashion.
Anne Witchard is Lecturer in the department of English, Linguistics and
Cultural Studies at the University of Westminster, London. She is the author of
Thomas Burke’s Dark Chinoiserie: Limehouse Nights and the Queer Spell of Chinatown
(Ashgate, 2009). Lao She, London and China’s Literary Revolution is forthcoming
(Hong Kong University Press).
Julian Wolfreys is Professor of Modern Literature and Culture at Loughborough
University, and the author or editor of around 40 books, his most recent
being Thomas Hardy (Palgrave) and Literature, in Theory: Tropes, Subjectivities,
Responses and Responsibilities (Continuum). He is currently compiling The Derrida
Concordance.
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