Gothic by Roger Lockwood
Gothic is a multiverse of meanings in Roger Luckhurst’s book, Gothic: An Illustrated History. Primarily, the University of London professor is concerned with Gothic as horror, a literary phenomenon that became distinct in the 18th century and whose tropes crept two centuries later into the nascent medium of film. On screen, images once left to individual imaginations were etched into public consciousness. Bela Lugosi will be forever first in mind when recalling Bram Stoker’s aristocratic vampire.
Luckhurst’s Illustrated History covers several centuries, many media and entire continents as he traces its origins in Northern European anxiety about— … just about everything—and its mutation and reinvention in many parts of the world. The book is arranged around themes broad as well as narrow and film finds its way into many pages. In “British Film Horror,” which examines stories set in the island kingdom’s backwaters, Lackhurst examines The Wicker Man (1973), “a total, immersive world of folkloric weirdness” indebted to James George Frazer’s compendium of the primeval, The Golden Bough. “Covens sometimes hide in plain sight in the cities,” Luckhurst points out elsewhere, with Rosemary’s Baby (1968) as the best-known case.
The author coins terms for several subgenres, including “EcoGothic,” whose emergence of monsters such as Gojira (1954) sound the warning that nature has been disturbed.
Gothic: An Illustrated History is lavishly illustrated as well as ambitious in scope as it maps the outlines of many overlapping shadow kingdoms. It’s a fun book to open at random. One criticism: the author is too indebted to the still fashionable rhetoric of Edward Said’s Orientalism, which rightly condemned Western empire-enabling stereotypes of the “mysterious East” while ignoring the liberating influence of the imagined East on the Western imagination. Gothic: An Illustrated History is published by Princeton University Press.
