Gothic Mash-Ups: Hybridity, Appropriation, and Intertextuality in Gothic Storytelling

(Hardback)

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Gothic Mash-Ups explores the role of intertextuality in Gothic storytelling through the analysis of texts from diverse periods and media. Drawing on recent scholarship on Gothic remix and adaptation, the contributors examine crossover fictions, multi-source film and comic book adaptations, neo-Victorian pastiches, performance magic, monster mashes, and intertextual Gothic works of various kinds. Their chapters investigate many critical issues related to Gothic mash-up, including authorship, originality, intellectual property, fandom, commercialization, and canonicity. Although varied in approach, the chapters all explore how Gothic storytellers make new stories out of older ones, relying on a mix of appropriation and innovation. Covering many examples of mash-up, from nineteenth-century Gothic novels to twenty-first-century video games and interactive fiction, this collection builds from the premise that the Gothic is a fundamentally hybrid genre.

Reviews

This well-structured, highly revealing, thorough, scholarly, yet always accessible collection shows how mash-ups intermingling once-disparate elements in many different media yet always with visibly Gothic echoes extend well beyond the likes of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. These revelations draw us both backward to expose how Gothic fictions have always been mash-ups and forward to detail how those mixtures have been exfoliated in comics, performance magic, video games, and a very wide range of films and texts not always recognized as mash-ups to the extent they really are. The result is a strong, expansive rewriting of the history of the Gothic that every student and fan of that mode should take account of from now on.

Author Bio

Natalie Neill is assistant professor of English at York University.