Queer Gothic

Queer Gothic: An Edinburgh Companion features sixteen essays that interrogate Queer Theory’s intersections with the Gothic. The essays explore expansive Queer Gothic modes in art, film, literature, and media from the eighteenth through the first two decades of the twenty-first centuries. By revisiting the usefulness of the term ‘queer’ and by pushing queer theoretical frameworks into new territory, this volume explores the ways that Gothic and queer function alongside each other: one as a marginalised genre and the other as a marginalised identity. Considering both major and lesser-known Gothic works, and ranging from the canonical (poetry and fiction) to the popular (film, video games, music, and visual and performance art), it offers queer and trans perspectives on a wide selection of Gothic modes, genres and texts from fiction such as Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto to Jeanette Winterson’s The Daylight Gate, films from Nosferatu to Blacula and The Cured and TV shows including In the Flesh, Pose and What We Do in the Shadows. In considering the theory of José Esteban Muñoz who argued that queer theory has not yet arrived – that it is a mode for the future – these chapters in this volume aid the evolution of Queer Gothic theories and help us to visualise the construction of the next iteration of Queer Gothic.