Globalgothic focuses on certain negative aspects of globalisation, including corporatism, neo-imperialism and the dangers of living in a high-risk culture that frequently sails perilously close to catastrophe. An interesting twenty-first-century version of gothic, The Dark Knight reworks classic gothic devices to structure its plot dynamic. It not only adapts the concept of the city space as threatening but also exploits the figure of the double or doppelganger. The Dark Knight is a work that openly focuses on men, power and the law despite its flirtation with romantic love. In fact what The Dark Knight illustrates so chillingly are the threats, uncertainties and negative spin-offs that result from what Zygmunt Bauman has termed 'liquid modernity'. Bauman's vision seems to be reflected in The Dark Knight to generate a potent, if perhaps only half-consciously realised, fear in the audience: fear of political, economic and judicial impotence in a 'speedflow' world.

In this collection we examine closely and celebrate the place of comedy in the Gothic. Research in this area has burgeoned and now academ¬ics are investigating the role of Comic Gothic not only in the work of established authors and celebrated films, but also in children's literature, cartoon mash-ups, performance art and modern media. Gothic scholars no longer easily dismiss humour in dark texts as ‘comic relief’ and their work is altogether more nuanced and sophisticated in its understanding of how, and to what end, comedy informs Gothic texts.

When our book Gothic and the Comic Turn was published in 2005, we hoped that it would open a new line of enquiry into Gothic litera¬ture and film. We argued then that the contemporary understanding of Gothic did not capture the hybridity of most Gothic works; signifi¬cantly, their juxtaposition of incongruous textual effects – in particular comedy and horror – tended to be overlooked. We suggested this aspect of the Gothic mode, combined with its inherent instability and hybrid¬ity, enabled it simultaneously to appal and amuse. The ‘comic turn’ in Gothic is not, we claimed, an aberration or a corruption of a ‘serious’ genre; rather, it is intrinsic to a mode of writing that has been hybrid since its very inception.

It is perhaps no coincidence that the rise of Gothic was contemporary with the rise of opera and melodrama. Creators of all three were cas¬tigated for ignoring generic conventions; for embracing surface rather than depth; for delighting in excess: the result is ‘absurd’ and ‘mon¬strous’ works that evoke laughter as well as horror. Building on Peter Brooks's argument in The Melodramatic Imagination (1995), that ‘the melodramatic mode is an inescapable dimension of modern conscious¬ness’, we suggested that the comic within the Gothic foregrounds a self-reflexivity and dialectical impulse intrinsic to the modern subject. Aspects of comedy, such as irony, satire, parody, pastiche and the absurd, play important roles within this dialectic.

Old Age, at least in the West, has recently become a pressing issue for several reasons. The ‘demographic time bomb’ ticks away inexorably, prompting new interest in researching the implications of an ageing population. The emergence of age studies in cultural studies, pioneered by thinkers such as Margaret Morganroth Gullette and Kathleen Woodward in the USA, designated pots of money in the UK's Arts and Humanities Research Council for research into age-related issues, the UK coalition government's decision to dedicate an extra £6 million to research into Alzheimer's Disease (2014): all of these signal that ageing needs ‘dealing with’, whether from a cultural, medical or social perspective. Although there have been initiatives to think about older people more positively and to get them back to work – or, one might say more cynically, exploit them as an economic resource – the sense that the aged are a ‘problem’ is still widespread, particularly in highly sophisticated technological societies driven by the young. As Simone de Beauvoir pointed out over forty years ago: ‘Modern technocratic society thinks that knowledge does not accumulate with the years but grows out of date. Age brings disqualification with it: age is not an advantage’ (de Beauvoir 1985: 210). As with women's internalisation of masculine values, so the internalisation of societal perspectives on the old can lead to a sense of dislocation and, at its most extreme, existential crisis, in even the most talented individual. W. B. Yeats wrote of himself as ‘a tattered coat upon a stick’, for example, and Daphne du Maurier expressed horror at her appearance in photographs taken when she was 58 that made her look ‘like an old peasant woman of ninety’ ([1965] Malet 1993: 194). This ‘Othering’ of the self is due partly to the recognition of inevitable physical change and decay in one's own body and the sense of split subjectivity it can produce, and partly to the acceptance of social attitudes which see the old as irrelevant and an (increasingly heavy) economic burden.

It is clear that gender and age are both culturally inflected dimensions of subjectivity. Whereas medical science decrees 65 as the age at which senescence begins for both men and women, patriarchal societies tend to devalue women at a much younger age.