Dr. Carol Davison has two spring 2017 book releases

“People always ask me what the Gothic is,” says Carol Davison, head of UWindsor’s English department. “They like and know the word but are clueless as to its long and complicated history as an aesthetic term that morphed into our cultural lexicon.”

 

Largely because of the Gothic’s popularity across reading classes in the 18^th and 19^th centuries when it was maligned as addictive and, in some key cases, promoting sexual deviance and political subversion, the Gothic remains hugely popular.  “Just turn on your television sets and you can see its infiltration is such series as Six Feet Under, Westworld, and Game of Thrones,” says Dr. Davison. 

 

In some ways, to edit a collection of critical essays is more difficult than penning one’s own monograph because of the need to create coherence and cohesion across widely diverse chapters. “To make a collection cohere is perhaps the greatest challenge,” says Dr. Davison, “I certainly faced that with The Gothic and Death where I received over 80 abstracts devoted to a variety of texts.  I believe this work, comprised of 15 chapters, was ultimately tied together nicely under 5 key section headings but I’ll wait to see what the reviewers have to say.”

 

“As I have various other academic and creative projects on the go relating to these subjects, taking the pulse on the diversity of scholarship being developed in these areas was hugely helpful and resulted in some wonderful cross-fertilization,” explained Dr. Davison. “That was especially true for my novel-in-progress, Bodysnatcher, which reconceptualizes the Burke & Hare murders of the late 1820s in Edinburgh from a feminist perspective as a he-said, she-said dark Gothic romance with a twist. I will return to my homeland of Scotland in order to complete some research along with the novel during my forthcoming sabbatical, which is scheduled for this July – December.”

 

 

Publishers Descriptions:

Written from various critical standpoints by internationally renowned scholars, Scottish Gothic: An Edinburgh Companion interrogates the ways in which the concepts of the Gothic and Scotland have intersected and been manipulated from the mid-eighteenth century to the present day. This interdisciplinary collection is the first ever published study to investigate the multifarious strands of Gothic in Scottish fiction, poetry, theatre and film. Its contributors - all specialists in their fields - combine an attention to socio-historical and cultural contexts with a rigorous close reading of works, both classic and lesser known, produced between the eighteenth and twenty-first centuries.

 

The Gothic and death offers the first ever published study devoted to the subject of the Gothic and death across the centuries. It investigates how the multifarious strands of the Gothic and the concepts of death, dying, mourning and memorialisation ('the Death Question') - have intersected and been configured cross-culturally to diverse ends from the mid-eighteenth century to the present day. Drawing on recent scholarship in such fields as Gothic Studies, film theory, Women's and Gender Studies and Thanatology Studies, this interdisciplinary collection of fifteen essays by international scholars combines an attention to socio-historical and cultural contexts with a rigorous close reading of works, both classic and lesser known. This area of enquiry is considered by way of such popular and uncanny figures as corpses, ghosts, zombies and vampires, and across various cultural and literary forms such as Graveyard Poetry, Romantic poetry, Victorian literature, nineteenth-century Italian and Russian literature, Anglo-American film and television, contemporary Young Adult fiction and Bollywood film noir.

 

Scottish Gothic: An Edinburgh Companion is published by Edinburgh University Press.

The Gothic and Death is published by Manchester University Press.