Some error occured while loading the Quick View. Please close the Quick View and try reloading the page.
This book reads the Gothic corpus with a thoroughly postmodern critical apparatus, pointing out that the Gothic Sublime anticipates our own doomed desire to pass beyond the hyperreal. A highly sophisticated theoretical reading of key texts of the Gothic, this book allows the reader to re-live the Gothic, not simply as a nostalgic relic or a pre-romantic aberration, but as a living presence that has strong resonances with the postmodern condition.
"Vijay Mishra's The Gothic Sublime is a learned, richly speculative and historically grounded study of the gothic as a discourse/genre centered in the psychological tactics and 'uncanny' thematics initiated in The Castle of Otranto, moving through William Godwin, Mary Shelley, and Melville, into the tactics and thematics of the postmodern condition as influentially figured in theorists such as Lyotard, Jameson, Sedgwick, and Lacan."—Rob Wilson, University of Hawaii
"Vijay Mishra belongs to that rare breed of literary scholars who are equally at home in English and Indian literatures. His profound understanding of both traditions enables him to interrogate the strengths of each, by situating each in a vibrant discursive horizon. He brings this broad cultural understanding to retheorizing the Gothic Sublime."—Wimal Dissanayake, Editor, East-West Film Journal
Acknowledgments
Introduction Reading Others Reading the Gothic
1 Theorizing the (Gothic) Sublime
2 The Precursor Text
3 Gothic Fragments and Fragmented Gothics
4 Unstable Text/Unstable Readings: William Godwin's Caleb Williams
5 Apocalyptic Narratives: Tales of Ends
6 Frankenstein : Sublime as Desecration/Decreation
7 The Gothic Sublime and Literary History
Notes
Select Bibliography
Index