Examines the reception of the canonical gospels and of their ‘effects’ in particular times and places. Here, the first part gives an account of reception history as a relatively new discipline in gospel studies, while the second part offers as a case study some of the ways in which the synoptic stories of the women who visit the tomb of Jesus have been represented in the visual arts.

Investigates the proliferating texts and traditions about Jesus in the early church and the decision in favour of the canonical four. By examining the competing options, the decision in favour of a fourfold gospel is seen as a decision for plurality within limits: the limits sustaining the coherence of the apostolic testimony to Jesus, and the plurality allowing the richness and complexity of the truth about Jesus to be displayed.

Postdigital Gothic describes a mode of narrative and critical enquiry that evokes the unsettling nature of human and nonhuman actors interwoven within technological assemblages. This represents a turn away from the ‘Cybergothic’ fascination with the ghostly, immaterial aspects of digital media. Instead, Postdigital Gothic calls attention to hidden architecture undergirding the virtual. From sound and image compression formats to the secret algorithms that fuel social media, the digital realm is not an empty portal for ghosts, but rather a vault of manuscripts buried beneath familiar interfaces. The unspeakable manifests itself through the noise of computer glitches, compression artefacts and sonic disruptions. Those unwelcome disturbances signify our human entanglement with the nonhuman. This chapter begins and ends by highlighting cinematic examples of Postdigital Gothic narratives, first, in found footage horror, and then, in the computer screen horror movies Unfriended (2014) and Unfriended: Dark Web (2018). In addition to those readings of cinematic texts, a Postdigital Gothic interpretation of popular compression formats for music (MP3) and images (JPEG) suggests the usefulness of the Gothic as tool for understanding the interpretive work of machinic speech.

This chapter reassesses the relationship between the Gothic and the cinematic experience within the silent cinema era. At its birth in 1895, the very medium of cinema itself was perceived as inherently Gothic. Maxim Gorky’s famous allusion to a ‘kingdom of shadows’ full of grey, silent figures that filled him with ‘breathless horror’ evoked the spectre of the uncanny that underpins the Gothic experience. Yet, this chapter demonstrates that if one examines the history of the Gothic in the silent era, the Gothic changes from being an intrinsic part of the cinema experience to becoming a series of narrative and stylistic elements that ultimately form part of a kind of proto-horror, a mise-en-scène in search of a genre. By focusing not upon story elements but rather upon the ongoing association between the Gothic and the cinematographic through the use of cinematic techniques to convey subjective states of being, this chapter examines how the Gothic potential of the cinematic experience that was fundamental to the era of cinema’s birth did not disappear but rather remained, and continues to remain, embedded within cinema itself.

While multicultural policy might be represented as a failure, or multicultural reality as threatening, the Gothic – as a psychoanalytic mode with a ready shorthand for the representation of violence, alienation and monstrosity – is ideally suited to return what mainstream discourse represses, to engage with the subject of fear and to speak the unspeakable. This chapter demonstrates how contemporary Gothic literature functions to reveal that which multicultural discourse seeks to repress: racism and inequality. I argue that alternative accounts of cultural contact foreground socio-economic inequality, racism and structural violence, while registrations of the impossible and the absurd function to signify a failure in discourse. The Gothic aesthetic is equally suited to represent sectarian violence as a source of fear through the literalisation of monstrosity, and I argue that in engaging with the mechanics of monster-making, contemporary Gothic offers a critique of the construction of fear (and terror) as a tool of (rather than a threat to) governments. Finally, I consider contemporary Gothic’s engagement with the afterlife as a space of multicultural harmony, equality and justice, holding a heterotopic mirror up to the inequalities of the present in which the management of diversity is hostage to political corruption and economic disparity.

This chapter examines Gothic traditions in East Asian cinema, with a specific focus on films and popular culture from Japan, South Korea and Hong Kong. The chapter explores key features of the East Asian Gothic mode: generic hybridity, mythology, morality and important historical moments in the Western reception of influential films. The central argument uniting the analysis of these three distinct national cinemas concerns the narrative and thematic meaning of the figure of the ghost. How are local audiences expected and invited to respond to these avatars of the deceased? What do they reflect from contemporary society, and how do they comment on the past? The ghost in many of these films is not only an object of fear (indeed, it is frequently not an object of fear at all), but also, with varying frequency, a lover, or a hero or a subject of profound pity and sadness. The evolving meaning of the ghost in films from Japan, South Korea and Hong Kong suggests some ways that definitions and understandings of the Gothic should be reconfigured for a global media context.

This chapter looks at how the postcolonial negotiates the Gothic. Both are informed by a degree of suspicion about European Enlightenment rationalism and its constructs, but the Gothic also depends on colonial European elements – the Devil as Black, the Oriental artefact, obeah – for its effects. The postcolonial Gothic needs these effects – for the scream, as I argue, is central to the Gothic – but cannot use the same instruments because, by definition, postcolonialism adopts a critical and questioning attitude to colonial European discourses as well. By looking at a number of texts, especially the Caribbean Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, the South African André Brink’s Devil’s Valley, the Australian Peter Carey’s Jack Maggs, and the British-Indian Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People, I show how the Gothic villain or the Gothic secret is manipulated by postcolonialism to combine its critical perspectives with the Gothic’s generic requirements.

Identifies some of the defining characteristics of the gospel genre by comparing them with other genres such as folk tales, memoirs, biographies, scriptural narratives and martyrologies. The analysis leads to the significant conclusion that the gospels are in some sense sui generis – written versions of early Christian teaching and preaching about Jesus.

Since the 1980s, the ubiquity of Gothic monsters across literary, filmic and televisual media indicates both a widespread need to give form to the amorphous forces that shape our lives under free market capitalism and an eschatological awareness of all that has been lost and destroyed by the dark energies of neoliberal economics. The Neoliberal Gothic, this chapter argues, adopts the conventions of the Gothic mode to indict the perpetrators of global misery while enabling us to think around our investment in the neoliberal status quo and imagine a better way of being in the world. The Neoliberal Gothic becomes, therefore, a means of both seeing and being other-wise, proffering both critique of the present and a roadmap to a future in which our cities do not lie in ruins and we do not feel hunted by dark forces that we have no power to resist. Texts under consideration include the television series: American Horror Story, (2011), Carnivàle (2003–5) and The Strain (2012–17); films Blade (1998) and Land of the Dead (2005); and Justin Cronin’s novels The Passage (2010), The Twelve (2012) and City of Mirrors (2016).

When the Bush administration launched the War on Terror after the attacks of 9/11, Gothic responded through complex critiques of the discourses and the violence this entailed, but also by unapologetically energising the endeavour to maintain US global hegemony. Noting a number of geopolitical, economical and cultural similarities between late nineteenth-century Britain and the US at the turn of the millennium, this chapter observes that a dominant strand of American Gothic in the early twenty-first century is in fact effectively imperial. The chapter then discusses the interplay between what can thus be termed an ‘American Imperial Gothic’ and the post-9/11 period, paying particular attention to the ideological and affective work that Gothic performs. Located at the intersection between postcolonial and decolonial studies, and international relations and security studies, the chapter furthermore explores how a union of various entertainment corporations and government institutions is involved in the production and dissemination of often deeply reactionary Gothic texts. These rehearse racists and sexist tropes central to the neocolonial project, but also reveal how the anxieties always tied to vast imperial and capitalist projects rise to the surface during moments of sudden upheaval and transformation.

Places the four gospels in the scriptural environment of Israel’s story. Taking each gospel in turn, Hays and Blumhofer show that the scriptures constitute the gospels’ ‘generative milieu’. The stories about Jesus gain their full intelligibility within the context of the textual tradition and the larger scriptural story of God’s dealings with Israel.

The haunted house in contemporary Gothic literature and film serves as a means of conceptualising the current environmental crisis and troubled relationships with the humanity-supporting ecosystems that this brings. The ‘bad oikos’ – a haunted house whose haunting derives from the ‘malign sentience’ of a living house – confronts audiences with both nonhuman agency and the human entanglement with it, and so demands that we extract ourselves from what Amitav Ghosh has termed ‘modes of concealment’ regarding climate change and other anthropogenic environmental impacts. This chapter examines the development and recent popularity of the bad oikos, exploring its origins in 1970s debates over ecofeminism and fossil fuels in texts such as Robert Marasco’s Burnt Offerings (1973) and Anne Rivers Siddons’s The House Next Door (1978), and then sketching its contemporary contours in a recent spate of texts from Darren Aronofsky’s mother! (2017) through Netflix’s hit show The Haunting of Hill House (2018) to It! (2017) and the surreal YouTube animated series Ghost House (2018–). Investigating the specific anxieties that impel these new versions of the bad oikos, the chapter considers the links that such texts forge between between large-scale environmental degradation, child abuse and identity-shifting transcorporeality.

This chapter considers the ways in which Gothic as a mode interacts with queer history generally and with the history of AIDS and queer communities more specifically within late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century contexts. This chapter examines the elision of the histories of Gothic, AIDS and queer sexuality in four texts that marked different stages of the evolution of the AIDS discourse. The first half of the chapter focuses on individual and collective community trauma in the first decade of the AIDS pandemic as represented in Tony Scott’s 1983 arthouse vampire film The Hunger and Todd Haynes’s 1991 seminal New Queer Cinema triptych, Poison. The second half of this chapter considers the ongoing haunting from the first decade of AIDS trauma in the face of a devastating disease and the initial scapegoating of the queer community as the site of contagion. These hauntings are depicted in John Greyson’s 1993 AIDS musical satire, Zero Patience and Lilly and Lana Wachowski and J. Michael Straczynski’s 2015–18 trans-genre television show, Sense8.

Quash draws Christian doctrine, the hermeneutics of gospels interpretation and the Christian iconic tradition into lively conversation. His central claim is that the Spirit of God mediates the life of Christ risen and ascended to the church and the world, and that this happens through the reading and hearing of the gospels and their ongoing representation in such works as Graham Sutherland’s Christ in Glory.