In American films of the 1930s and 1940s, King of the Zombies, and I Walked with a Zombie, gothic themes are played out in a racialised context. Here, a displaced South, the Caribbean, provides the setting for a sexualised encounter with an otherness exuding colonial anxieties and demanding to be suppressed. On the surface White Zombie presents a tale of amorous delusion and possession equating race and sexuality as forms of otherness to be mastered through diabolical possession or be reclaimed by love, rationality or religion. In White Zombie primitivism and superstition are set against civilisation and reason. Max Brooks's World War Z was written as supplement to a UN report documenting human testimonies on the suffering, devastation and rebuilding of the zombie war. It charts the emergence and overcoming of global swarms of living dead.

Ardel Haefele-Thomas in Chapter 2 analyses Elizabeth Gaskell’s pioneering of alternative family ties in her short Gothic fictional texts. Gaskell utilizes the Gothic genre to explore and provide points of escape for women confined within abusive, heteronormative situations. From her understanding of the ways that gender, class and subversions of ‘normative’ heterosexual family structures can function together to create transgressive critiques and narratives, Gaskell finds a place to carry out queer family re-structurings within her Gothic short fiction. Haefele-Thomas explores contemporary queer theory focusing specifically on ideas of transgender and gender queer positionality as well as historic references to famous nineteenth-century cross-dressing cases that may have influenced Elizabeth Gaskell’s thinking about the topic.

Chapter 12 examines evaluations of the nuclear family in a contextual analysis of the recent Gothic film Mum & Dad (2008, dir. Steven Sheil). This film, as medium of a discursive transformation of familial semantics, reflects and negotiates a paradoxical notion of order and cultural discontent in a way that can no longer be described adequately with the Gothic topoi of transgression and the monstrous. According to Schlegel, Steven Sheil’s film aims at a radical revaluation of familial values, which results in a notion of the family as an entity that is intrinsically perverted, yet the ineluctable condition of being and of subjectivity. Mum & Dad circumvents the inherent dialectics of transgression, by shifting towards something rather ‘ceremonial’, reflecting and negotiating a paradoxical notion of order and uneasiness in contemporary culture.

The novel series of Ford Madox Ford and R. H. Mottram show clearly the development of disenchantment in the latter part of the post-war decade. Both write between the Victorian and the modern, demonstrating a loyalty to the realist form but also engaging with new literary metaphors and techniques. Ford’s Parade’s End (1924-8) and R. H. Mottram’s The Spanish Farm Trilogy (1924-7) both feature a bureaucrat protagonist, the quintessential modern figure emblematising the impact of mechanisation and mass culture on individuals and social structures. Both adapt the family saga form: Ford uses subtle time shifts, while Mottram’s narratives intersect through a single location. Contextual links are made with contemporary philosophies and scientific discoveries about time and space. Both series highlight the intensification of disenchantment, and in particular Ford’s Last Post (1928) is an indictment of post-war decline in Britain.

This chapter presents analyses of textual dislocations and oral transformations of gothic narratives within a Canadian diasporic novel, David Chariandy's Soucouyant, which employs transnational gothic tropes from the vampire to the soucouyant. The globalgothic of Soucouyant attempts to circumvent the fears and anxieties of a breakdown in local communities and personal subjectivity. The diasporic shifts in boundaries and the migratory flights found in Soucouyant invoke a politics of location that disrupts points of order and invades the strongholds of reason. In the narrator's description of the soucouyant, skin plays a central role. Soucouyant moves fluidly from spirit possession and vampirism to the suffering caused by the overdetermined signifier known as presenile dementia. By linking such figures to the degenerative illness, Chariandy is primarily interested in an incapacitating state of unbecoming.

Chapter One explores the movement of the body of the Pardoner between Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, The Canterbury Interlude and the stained glass and architecture of Canterbury Cathedral. Dramatised in the spaces between the inn and the cathedral, suspended somewhere between London and Canterbury, the Pardoner is a portable pilgrim relic whose ontology is as inscrutable as his sexual anatomy. Signed with signs of Thomas Becket’s murder and his healing ampullae of blood and water, the Pardoner’s sexually illegible body conflates the desire for the revelation of hidden human anatomy with the parading of pilgrimage trophy. The Pardoner is a concealed display of an abjected Becket and a tormented Christ as he rides away from Canterbury at the rear of his pilgrim group. The play with signs and religious practice replicates how foundational church practices and beliefs move beyond strict ecclesiastical control.

Chapter Five discusses the intratemporal relationship of The Knight’s Tale to Two Noble Kinsmen, Davenant’s The Rivals, Lydgate’s The Siege of Thebes, and Dryden’s Palamon and Arcite. Two Noble Kinsmen incorporates the holiday world of The Miller’s Tale back into The Knight’s where it is only imperfectly contained. Davenant can be seen to swerve in and out of Fletcher and Shakespeare and Lydgate and Chaucer to tell the story of legitimate royal succession. His choice of Lydgatean names, however, cues the memory of noble annihilation and revolution yet to come. Only by diverting the course of Theban history and the end of The Knight’s Tale can Davenant stave off complete disaster but for him and for all the other authors (even including his ‘successor’ Dryden), political and literary lineage and are no more than staged manoeuvres. Poetic and royal lines of succession lack distinction.

Chapter 3 explores how hands in the written text of The Canterbury Tales reproduce the conflicted role of hands in medieval thought. When those hands come to be illustrated, they disrupt linear literary narrative and principles of manuscript ordination. Readers who come to illustrated copies of The Canterbury Tales are brought face to face with bodies that may tell anticipated memories of textual hands they have encountered elsewhere. Their recall and their expectation replays text and image back and forth across the visual and verbal texts of the Canterbury Tales and other places besides. The temporal movement of Chaucer’s ‘own’ hands is especially complex. Through discussion of gesture, manicules, and codicology, the chapter dismantles Chaucer’s iconic left hand from its customary placement.

Through examination of codicology and editorial procedure Chapter Two shows how The Canterbury Interlude and The Tale of Beryn (companion texts found two thirds of the way through MS Northumberland 455), upset chronological linearity and confound normative co-ordinates of time and place. The signs of personhood (especially props and names) in all these texts, and the Anglo-Norman source, Bérinus are radically unstable. In their Canterbury setting, narrated by a Merchant pilgrim, preceded by a Chaucerian Prologue, and in the midst of a codex of The Canterbury Tales, the foreign bodies of Bérinus become persons rather familiar from the works of Chaucer, especially Gioffrey and the inconsistent cameo appearances of ‘Chaucer himself’. The borders of narrative text and literary history unravel.

The obscure nature of British magnetism has shaped the manner in which historians of devil's hypnotism have regarded the relationship between the last two decades of the eighteenth century and the mid-nineteenth-century heyday of British magnetic practice. An eighteenth-century precursor to the many medical disciplines that were laying competing claims to the increasingly respectable title of hypnotism, the theoretical dogma of animal magnetism was controversial even at the time of the play's conception. Animal magnetism, or mesmerism as it was often called, was arguably an unavoidable linguistic correlative of any form of later trance-based curative, anaesthetic or diagnostic practice, whatever its formal appellation. This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book is a study of how the nineteenth-century popular mind envisaged, elided and expressed both magnetism and hypnotism.