The period from 1930 to 1990 saw an extraordinary development in the use of Gothic and horror to tell narratives about war and combat, mainly for two main purposes: first, to reveal and accentuate the horrific damage caused to bodies by combat, usually in order to denounce and demystify war; and second, figuratively to depict the less visible ways in which combat and war violence affect soldiers and civilians on a psychological level, especially through fear and trauma. A third form of War Gothic involves the dehumanisation of enemies by portraying them as monsters. All three forms are concerned with the ways in which war robs humans of their humanity, though the first two are largely critical of war while the third is basically a form of militaristic jingoism. This chapter focuses on a selection of texts from the first Hollywood zombie film, White Zombie (1932), to Jacob’s Ladder (1990), focusing especially on the Second World War and its veterans, and the literature and cinema of the Vietnam War. It ends with a brief discussion of War Gothic in the film and video game representations of the First Gulf War.

The author of the Gospel of Luke writes his story of Jesus against the widest possible backdrop. It is the story of the salvation of Israel and the nations in fulfilment of the promises of God in the scriptures. The new kingdom community which Jesus inaugurates by word and deed is one which challenges his contemporaries by transforming values and offering forgiveness and welcome to people of every condition and status.

Provides an overview of current hypotheses about the sources used in the creation of the gospels and the implications source-critical theories have for gospels interpretation. After a discussion of the relation of the Gospel of John to the synoptics, attention is given to relations between the synoptics, and an account is given of the ongoing scholarly debate surrounding the ‘Q hypothesis’ and its rivals.

McCarthy builds on a trend in the theology of scripture according to which the truth of the text is discovered in the ‘performance’ of the text in the lives of individuals and communities. On this basis, he offers a series of cameos in which the ‘exegesis’ of a gospel text takes biographical form, and the lives of saints and martyrs become a kind of extension of the scriptural canon.

Gothic media have reached unprecedented levels of commercialisation and, as a result, have begun to proliferate in new and interesting ways. From its roots in twelfth-century architecture and eighteenth-century fiction and theatre, Gothic has always been multimedia, and has always been remixed. Around the turn of the twenty-first century, however, the genre’s patchwork qualities began to take on a new intensity. What are the implications of this rapid rise in remixed Gothic, both for remix practices and for the Gothic mode? This chapter explores how remixes such as the GIF, the digitised photograph, the updating database and the social media network have all functioned in ‘monstrous’ or Gothic ways.

Frances Young explores the changing relationship in the history of the early church between the gospel texts and the determination of true doctrine. She shows that, even when the four gospels had been accepted as canonical, what shaped doctrine most was the overarching sense of what scripture as a whole was about, epitomized in the ’Rule of Faith’ and the creeds.

The Gospel of Mark unites ideas of christology and discipleship within a hermeneutical framework of Jewish apocalyptic. Mark’s story of Jesus, characterized by urgency, action and conflict, tells of the anointed warrior king who comes to establish his kingdom and liberate the oppressed from powers imperial and satanic. He does so, paradoxically, by submitting to death on a Roman cross, a death interpreted in the light of the scriptures as a ransom for many.

The Gothic and magic have had a long association. This essay is framed with some relevant remarks by the magician known as ‘Éliphas Lévi’, and refers to a number of twentieth- and twenty-first-century texts that might well be thought of as Gothic: Aleister Crowley’s Moonchild, H.P. Lovecraft’s The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, Denis Wheatley’s The Devil Rides Out, Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle, Iain Banks’s The Wasp Factory, M. John Harrison’s The Course of the Heart, Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell and F.G. Cottam’s House of Lost Souls. All of them have to do with magic, which is also to say that they approach the question of the supernatural through the route of conjuration and return, although from very different perspectives. They all have something to say about ritual magic, and therefore about the afterlife. Some of them express belief in the supernatural efficacy of magic; some do not – but the best leave it up to readers to decide for themselves.

This chapter examines Gothic versions of apocalypse in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Apocalypse in its biblical forms is associated both with divine revelation and with the imagining of social and political transformation. Gothic apocalypses adopt the visionary and revelatory aspects of biblical apocalypse, but do so in order to imagine bleak futures, whether in the cosmic chaos of Weird fiction or in the more secular-materialist anxieties of political corruption, nuclear destruction, or economic and environmental collapse. The returned dead of Gothic fictions hint at the resurrected body in Christian eschatology, but here emptied of redemptive possibility: the body returns not in the likeness of the risen Christ, but in the monstrous form of the zombie, vampire or revenant. Yet if Gothic apocalypses often depict the dehumanisation of the human and the collapse of the modern political and economic order, their visions of catastrophe also open space for the exploration of new ways of being on the other side of the end. Confronting contemporary anxieties around ecological destruction and economic crisis, Gothic apocalypses in the twenty-first century offer tentative glimpses of renewal in a remade world.

This chapter examines the interpenetration of Gothic and heritage discourses in literary works of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, looking at the impact of heritage issues on Gothic texts and the irruption of Gothic tropes into heritage romances and time-slip narratives. It argues that issues of protection, ownership and custodianship of monuments, artefacts and landscapes, all so central to the heritage movement, re-inflect Gothic tropes in stories by M. R. James (where the Gothic object is a heritage artefact and issues of custodianship become central) and in Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca (1938) (where the Gothic house is presented as an endangered heritage object). Conversely, in Alison Uttley’s A Traveller in Time (1938), Gothic tropes express the dangers of heritage sensibilities. Sarah Waters’s The Little Stranger (2009), which pathologises heritage sensibilities, is read as a twisted heritage romance. Discussing Penelope Lively’s The Whispering Knights (1971) and David Rudkin’s Penda’s Fen (1974) as texts responding to the new discipline of landscape history, the chapter argues that W G Hoskins's The Making of the English Landscape (1955) is a key text in the development of Folk Horror.

This chapter provides a fresh, detailed and historicised account of ‘high’ Modernism and its relationship to the Gothic, c.1910–1936. It explores the various ways in which Modernist theories of the aesthetic – the novel, the short story, Imagist poetry – shaped Gothic Modernist representations. Many Modernists overtly despised dark Romanticism – Wyndham Lewis derided the ‘beastly and ridiculous spirit of Keats’ lines’ and Virginia Woolf was quick to dismiss ‘the skull-headed lady’ of the Gothic Romance. Instead, their work privileges an aesthetics of finitude and inference over any use of overtly supernatural machinery. ‘Modern’ accounts of psychology shape these representations of anxiety and entrapment but so, too, do authorial theories of the aesthetic. By reading the work of a range of important Modernist contributors, including Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, E. M. Forster and May Sinclair, this chapter suggests that the most enduring examples of Modernist Gothic are found in the mode’s representations of haunting, the unconscious and the dead.

This Introduction seeks to map the history of Gothic scholarship in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries as the academic discipline we might now call Gothic Studies came into being. It draws lines of connection between works through four significant, overlapping stages: the first wave of Gothic criticism between the 1920s and the 1960s; the emergence of Gothic Studies as an academic discipline from the late 1970s to the early 2000s; the increasing understanding of Gothic as a ‘contemporary’ mode in the 1980s and beyond; and finally, what can be seen as the institutionalisation of Gothic in the twenty-first century. In doing so, it argues that Gothic Studies in the twenty-first century is simultaneously at its most fertile and at an impasse, a complex deadlock that Gothic scholars of the future must resolve.

Simon Gathercole surveys the various non-canonical gospels and their respective christologies. He first orients the reader to the field of research, noting the competitive positioning of non-canonical gospels relative to the four canonical gospels. He then shows how more recent scholarship has sought either to blur the canonical boundary or to compare and contrast the canonical gospels with their non-canonical counterparts in respect of history, theology and ethics.

Reads the Gospel of Matthew for its main content and themes. Deines shows how the gospel reveals Jesus’ universal significance by means of his Jewish particularity, signalled by his reformulation of Davidic messiahship and Abrahamic heritage. In this light, Matthew is interpreted as a gospel for all Christians, a new scripture for a new time and a new people whose life is shaped by Jesus’ life and teaching.

In September 1968, regular British Vogue columnist Polly Devlin returned from a year working for the magazine’s sister publication in New York, and published a long article commenting on how, in her absence, the mood had changed.

Since the millennium, there has been a boom in Gothic stories in the Scandinavian countries. Many of them have received global attention, such as John Ajvide Lindqvist’s vampire novel Let the Right One in (2004), which has been adapted into two films, one Swedish-language film and one American version. This chapter addresses the historical and cultural context for this contemporary outburst of Gothic stories in the Scandinavian countries. It also presents some possible prerequisites for its international success. First, the chapter provides a survey of Gothic fiction in the Nordic countries, from its beginning in the nineteenth century up to the present. It demonstrates how Scandinavian Gothic is densely intertextual at the same time as it makes visible political and ecological anxieties central for the understanding of Scandinavian identities and ideologies. It also emphasises the use of Nordic settings and local folklore. Second, the mode expands on three distinct Gothic categories in Scandinavian narratives: the use of local popular believes in today’s crossover and Young Adult stories, the Gothic qualities of the Scandinavian landscape and its mythic creatures, and the rise of certain Gothic hybrid genres, such as Gothic crime.

There is an inherently Gothic lexicon at work in Betty Friedan’s landmark feminist study The Feminine Mystique (1963), connecting ‘the problem that has no name’ with the burial alive of the typical 1960s housewife. That language of unspeakable or unnameable enclosure recurs throughout the female Gothic and transcends the perceived disparity between its popular and literary manifestations. Victoria Holt’s popular Gothic romance, Mistress of Mellyn (1961), is shown to encapsulate just as successfully as more ‘serious’ Gothic texts many of the political concerns of second-wave feminism, including domestic incarceration, sisterhood, objectification by the masculine gaze and the allure of a ‘Super-Male’. Turning to the literary end of the Gothic spectrum, the chapter discusses these themes in selected works by Angela Carter; in Anne Sexton’s poem ‘Rapunzel’ (1971); Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987); and in Sarah Waters’s Fingersmith (2002). Thereafter it examines the interface between second- and third-wave feminist generations, noting how often, in Gothics, older women continue to be associated with monstrosity or sexual redundancy. While, in the Gothic, women are depicted as the victims of libertine sexuality, violation and coercion, this chapter also explores the roles that women themselves perform in the patriarchal exploitation of their sisters.

Studies the ‘afterlife’ of the gospels into the public realm – the realm of morality and politics. According to Bader-Saye, the gospels are misunderstood if they are confined to the realm of the personal. Rather, the gospels are a summons to a moral life expressive of shared ‘deep themes’ of liberation, dispossession and love. He elaborates on this through a critical appreciation of the way these gospel themes have been taken up in modern discussions of ethics and politics from Immanuel Kant to Romand Coles.