Using as a point of departure the paradigmatic example of musical landscape – Felix Mendelssohn’s overture The Hebrides (Fingal’s Cave), Op. 26 – this chapter considers how the idea of landscape came to shape the composition and subsequent reception of numerous Romantic works. In addition to addressing the question of why so much of this music has been heard to evoke a sense of place, attention is given to the very act of contemplating landscape, both by composers and by the protagonists that often occupy their works. Particular attention is given to Beethoven, Schumann, Liszt, and Mahler, but the expansive view of musical Romanticism offered here encompasses the proto-programmatic genre of the characteristic symphony, as well as the music of a diverse array of twentieth- and twenty-first-century composers from Charles Ives to Jonathan Harvey, composers whose engagement with Romantic landscape tropes reveal the continued relevance of this rich tradition.

In the first half of the nineteenth century, changes in philosophy and aesthetics as well as the increasing prominence of ‘pure’ instrumental music brought to a head questions over the meaning and value of music. While the merit of most of the fine arts (literature, painting, sculpture) was beyond serious doubt, instrumental music’s supposed lack of content posed a peculiar problem to writers. This chapter presents four main Romantic strategies used to argue for music’s meaning, including the use of programmes as well as the rethinking of the relations between music and feeling, music and words, and between content and form. Covering the first half of the nineteenth century, it encompasses the view of philosophers and composers as well as writers and critics, from Schopenhauer, Hoffmann, and Tieck to Mendelssohn, Schumann, Wagner, Brendel, and Hanslick.

This chapter discusses the ways in which psychoanalytic concepts influenced the American popular Gothic during the post-war era. The 1950s and 1960s were what Nathan G. Hale has described as the ‘Golden Age of Popularization’ for psychoanalytic thought in the United States. The historical underpinnings of this psychoanalytic ‘boom’ period are discussed, with a focus upon the prominent place occupied by American ego psychology during this period. As argued, this influence soon permeated the ‘popular Gothic’ fiction of the era, which was characterised by texts which revolved around tensions rooted in the dysfunctional nuclear family, sexual and emotional repression, and unresolved childhood trauma. The work of authors such as Robert Bloch, Charles Beaumont, William March and Ira Levin is considered. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the ways in which the late 1970s ‘Satanic Panic’ scare, which drew upon both core psychoanalytic principles and the most lurid elements found in works of horror fiction such as Rosemary’s Baby (1967) and The Exorcist (1971), severely damaged the movement’s reputation in the United States.

An introduction to the volume with rationale for the second edition and chapter summaries.

In the twenty-first century, Gothic pervades national literatures and cinemas even in some possibly unexpected parts of the world, such as the Islamic Middle East. Gothic texts and films from the region mainly aim to disentangle the genre from Western influence by including motifs from Islamic folklore and demonology such as the supernatural creatures known as ‘djinns’. While many Gothic texts from Islamic countries, such as Iran, are celebrated by Western audiences today for being politically progressive in outlook, a large number of Gothic texts and films from Turkey often tend to cultivate far more conservative values in correlation with governing political and religious orthodoxies. This chapter investigates the cultural origins of what might be called ‘Islamic Gothic’, highlighting its most common conventions concerning the representation of women haunted by malevolent djinns of Islamic cultures. Following a historical survey that sheds light on the development and popularity of Gothic in the Islamic Middle East, particularly in Egypt, Iran and Turkey, the chapter explores the role of the djinn, the mainstream monster of Islamic Gothic in Turkish literature and film, in establishing an ideological position that correlates with the rising popularity of conservative politics in the post millennium.

Television is an innately Gothic medium, bringing immaterial figures and stories of the horrors of the past and present into the family home. Across the development of television it has engaged with the Gothic in style, technologies and narratives, embracing the medium’s potential to suggest horror, while occasionally daring to embrace the graphic with developments in effects and visual clarity. In this way the Gothic aspects of television have engaged multiple audiences in different ways. Current television particularly presents a gothicisation of history, informing viewers of the traumas of the past through factual and fictional programming, from Who Do You Think You Are? to Peaky Blinders. As this chapter argues, we can therefore find the Gothic not just in the expected places, but throughout the medium of television.

In a detailed study of the gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, Stephen Barton examines the character of God in each narrative. He shows that controversial claims about God are implied at every point in the gospel stories of Jesus, shaped as they are by an apocalyptic worldview and by the parting of the ways between the synagogue and the church.

This chapter challenges the notion that the period is framed by two cinematic moments: the release of Dracula (1931) and The Curse of Frankenstein (1957). In contrast, it demonstrates that the former film emerged out of trends established in the 1920s and that, even in the 1930s, Universal was not the only game in town, and that other models of the Gothic cinema existed alongside it. It then moves on to explore developments in the 1940s, when many Gothic horror films pursued respectability through both the use of psychological materials and an association with female viewers. Finally, the chapter moves on to examine how the science fiction horror films of the 1950s sought to legitimise their monsters through scientific rather than supernatural explanations. The chapter also explores the ways in which these films provided a context for the making of The Curse of Frankenstein, even as they were countered by an alternative tradition of psychological horror that developed out of the success of the art house hit, Les Diaboliques (1955), and of the television series, Alfred Hitchcock Presents (1955–65).

This chapter explores the significance of Gothic to an emergent American modernist aesthetic, surveying a range of current theories of Gothic and focusing particularly on the legacies of slavery and the politics of segregation in the American South, but also evoking other historical traumas. European modernism is conventionally understood largely to have disavowed Gothic romance; by contrast, under the influence of William Faulkner and others, the particular strand of fiction associated with the Southern Literary Renaissance developed Gothic motifs into a distinctive idiom through which to explore themes of otherness and difference and to reflect on the significance of the individual and collective past, in depictions both disavowing and incorporating everyday deviance amid a society of social taboos against miscegenation, incest, homosexuality that were everywhere symbolically enforced though commonly violated in practice. In doing so, and in developing an ambivalent, paradoxical body of writings that might best be described as ‘modernist regional Gothic’, such writers as Carson McCullers and Flannery O’Connor took Gothic in a radically new direction.

Provides an analysis of historical Jesus studies and the key interpretative issues scholars seek to address. Surveying scholarship from the eighteenth century on, Fowl disentangles the guiding assumptions of historical Jesus research in its quest for a dispassionate assessment of historical ‘facts’ and interpretative frameworks. As case studies, Fowl compares the major accounts of Jesus offered by John Dominic Crossan, N. T. Wright and Luke Timothy Johnson.

Narrates a shift in reading methods from notions of objectivity and authorial intent to a reader-oriented approach which emphasizes the reader as the subject who interprets the text. Drawing upon the philosophical hermeneutics of Paul Ricoeur and Hans-Georg Gadamer, Schneiders argues that reading scripture is an event with the potential to transform the reader through the transcendent reality mediated by the text.