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Books by Xavier Aldana Reyes

Routledge Film Guidebooks, 2020

Arguing for the need to understand Gothic cinema as an aesthetic mode, this book explores its lon... more Arguing for the need to understand Gothic cinema as an aesthetic mode, this book explores its long history, from its transitional origins in phantasmagoria shows and the first ‘trick’ films to its postmodern fragmentation in the Gothic pastiches of Tim Burton.

But what is Gothic cinema and when did it begin? Is the iconography of the Gothic film the same, or equivalent to, that of the horror genre? Are the literary origins of the Gothic what solidified its aesthetics? And exactly what cultural roles does the Gothic continue to perform for us today? Gothic Cinema covers topics such as the chiaroscuro experiments of early German cinema, the monster cinema of the 1930s, the rise of the supernatural explained in the old dark house mystery films of the 1920s and the Female Gothics of the 1940s, the introduction of colour photography in the period Gothics of the late 1950s, the European exploitation booms of the 1960s and 1970s, and the animated films and Gothic superheroes that dominate present times. Throughout, Aldana Reyes makes a strong case for a tighter and more intuitive approach to the Gothic on screen that acknowledges its position within wider film industries with their own sets of financial pressures and priorities.

This ground-breaking book is the first thorough chronological, transhistorical and transnational study of Gothic cinema, ideal for both new and seasoned scholars, as well as those with a wider interest in the Gothic.

British Library Tales of the Weird, 2019

From one of the greatest and most prolific authors of twentieth century weird fiction come four o... more From one of the greatest and most prolific authors of twentieth century weird fiction come four of the very best strange stories ever told.

The Willows:

Two men become stranded on an island in the Danube delta, only to find that they might be in the domain of some greater power from beyond the limits of human experience.

The Wendigo:

A hunting party in Ontario begin to fear that they are being stalked by an entity thought to be confined to legend.

The Man Whom the Trees Loved:

A couple is driven apart as the husband is enthralled by the possessive and jealous spirits dwelling in the nearby forest.

Ancient Sorceries:

In conversation with the occult detective and physician Dr. John Silence, a traveller relates his nightmarish visit to a strange town in Northern France, and the maddening secret from his past revealed by its inhabitants.

British Library Tales of the Weird, 2019

As tragic antihero, hubristic maniac or sadistic villain, the mad scientist is as familiar to the... more As tragic antihero, hubristic maniac or sadistic villain, the mad scientist
is as familiar to the Gothic literary tradition as the seductive vampire
or evil monk.

Assembled here are ten thrilling tales of literature’s most brilliant
and misguided minds; minds that strive for the unnatural secrets of
immortality, artificial life and the teleportation of matter; minds that
must eventually grapple with the bitter cost of their obsessions.

From essential Gothic stories by Mary Shelley, E. T. A. Hoffmann
and Edgar Allan Poe to later forays into the weird and psychedelic
by E. Nesbit, H. P. Lovecraft and George Langelaan, the classic figure
of the mad scientist is reanimated in these pages along with every
untethered ambition and its calamitous consequences.

Edinburgh Companions to the Gothic, 2019

A transnational and transmedia companion to the post-millennial Gothic, this book: - Covers key ... more A transnational and transmedia companion to the post-millennial Gothic, this book:

- Covers key areas and themes of the post-millennial Gothic as well as developments in the field and revisions of the Gothic tradition.

- Constitutes the first thematic compendium to this area with a transmedia (literature, film and television) and transnational approach.

- Covers a plurality of texts, from novels such as Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight (2005), Helen Oyeyemi’s White Is for Witching (2009), Justin Cronin’s The Passage (2010) and M.R. Carey’s The Girl with All the Gifts (2014), to films such as Kairo (2001), Juan of the Dead (2012) and The Darkside (2013), to series such as Dante’s Cove (2005–7), Hemlock Grove (2013–15), Penny Dreadful (2014–16), Black Mirror (2011–) and even the Slenderman mythos.

This resource in contemporary Gothic literature, film and television takes a thematic approach, providing insights into the many forms the Gothic has taken in the twenty-first century. The 20 newly commissioned chapters cover emerging and expanding research areas, such as digital technologies, queer identity, the new weird and postfeminism. They also discuss contemporary Gothic monsters – including zombies, vampires and werewolves – and highlight Ethnogothic forms such as Asian and Black Diasporic Gothic.

CONTENTS:

Introduction: The Gothic in the Twenty-First Century, Maisha Wester and Xavier Aldana Reyes

PART 1 UPDATING THE TRADITION

1. Postcolonial Gothic - Sarah Ilott

2. Queer Gothic - Andrew J. Owens

3. Postfeminist Gothic - Gina Wisker

4. Neoliberal Gothic - Linnie Blake

5. Gothic Digital Technologies - Joseph Crawford

PART 2 CONTEMPORARY MONSTERS

6. Contemporary Zombies - Xavier Aldana Reyes

7. Contemporary Vampires - Sorcha Ní Fhlainn

8. Contemporary Serial Killers - Bernice M. Murphy

9. Contemporary Ghosts - Murray Leeder

10. Contemporary Werewolves - Kaja Franck and Sam George

PART 3 CONTEMPORARY SUBGENRES

11. The New Weird - Carl H. Sederholm

12. Ecogothic - Sharae Deckard

13. Gothic Comedy - Catherine Spooner

14. Steampunk - Claire Nally

15. Posthuman Gothic - Anya Heise-von der Lippe

PART 4 ETHNOGOTHIC

16. South African Gothic - Rebecca Duncan

17. Asian Gothic - Katarzyna Ancuta

18. Latin American Gothic - Enrique Ajuria Ibarra

19. Aboriginal Gothic - Katrin Althans

20. Black Diasporic Gothic - Maisha Wester

A splash of something huge resounds through the sea-fog. In the stillness of a dark room, some un... more A splash of something huge resounds through the sea-fog. In the stillness of a dark room, some unspeakable evil is making its approach.

This new selection offers the most chilling and unsettling of Hodgson's short fiction, from encounters with abominations at sea to fireside tales of otherworldly forces from his inventive `occult detective' character Carnacki, the ghost finder.

A master of conjuring atmosphere, when the horror inevitably arrives it is delivered with breathtaking pace and the author's unique evocation of overwhelming panic.

H. P. Lovecraft is best known for his tales of cosmic horror, in which unnameable nightmares torm... more H. P. Lovecraft is best known for his tales of cosmic horror, in which unnameable nightmares torment the limits of human consciousness. This mastery of weird and unspeakable terror is underpinned by the writers sizeable contribution to Gothic fiction. This new collection of Lovecrafts stories is the first to concentrate on his Gothic writing and includes tales from the beginning to the very end of the authors career. The writers weird vision mixes brilliantly with the trappings of earlier Gothic horror to form innovative mosaics of frightful fiction that will long haunt the readers subconscious.

This book demonstrates that the Gothic mode has been a permanent, if ever-shifting, fixture of th... more This book demonstrates that the Gothic mode has been a permanent, if ever-shifting, fixture of the literary and cinematic landscape of Spain since the first translations of Gothic novels in the late-eighteenth century. More importantly, it proposes that the Gothic was largely received as a liberating and transgressive artistic language by writers and filmmakers.

Spanish Gothic is the first introduction in English to the broad history of the Gothic mode in Spain. It focuses on key literary periods, such as Romanticism, the fin-de-siècle, spiritualist writings of the early-twentieth century, and the cinematic and literary booms of the 1970s and 2000s. It provides illustrative case studies of works by Agustín Pérez Zaragoza, Luis Gutiérrez, Joseph Blanco White, Espronceda, Bécquer, Justo Sanjurjo López de Gomara, Emilia Pardo Bazán, Emilio Carrère, Alfonso Sastre, Pilar Pedraza and Carlos Ruiz Zafón, and of films such as Frankenstein’s Bloody Terror (1968), Tombs of the Blind Dead (1972), The Others (2001), Pan’s Labyrinth (2006) and The Valdemar Inheritance (2011).

INTRODUCTION: DEFINING AND DELIMITING THE SPANISH GOTHIC
This introductory chapter begins by proposing that, whilst it has become customary to think that the Gothic mode arrived late in Spain and did not resonate with its artists or audiences, the Gothic has been a permanent, ever-shifting fixture since the first Spanish translations of Gothic novels in the late-eighteenth century. The chapter traces the ancient origins of evil supernatural phenomena in Spain’s literary history, especially in the ‘novela cortesana’ (courtly novel), but argues for the need to concentrate on the times following the arrival of the Gothic novel in translation. It also discusses the possibilities opened by the term ‘Gothic’ (as opposed to the more common ‘fantastic’), sets up the cinematic context and lays out the general parameters and structure of the book.

PART I: FIRST WAVE GOTHIC (1788–1834)

Chapter 1. Imported Terrors and First Genre Hybrids
This chapter traces the roots of the Spanish Gothic in the late-eighteenth century and identifies it as an evolving mode adapted to a different and heavily censored readerly context. The chapter begins with the type of translations that arrived in Spain in the 1780s, and centres on the perceived dangers of the Gothic as an artistic force. Gothic translations were very important; in fact, the most popular Gothic text to be published in this first period, 1831’s Galería fúnebre de espectros y sombras ensangrentadas / Funereal Gallery of Spectres and Bloody Shadows, by Agustín Pérez Zaragoza, was a translation of various short stories. The chapter focuses on this work before turning to Vicente Martínez Colomer’s El Valdemaro / Valdemaro (1792), an example of the type of hybrid Gothic novel of ‘delightful instruction’ that made it past censorship in Spain.

Chapter 2. The Early Spanish Gothic Novel (1800–34)
This chapter centres on the rise of the Spanish Gothic novel between 1800 and 1834. The Gothic novel in Spain at this point subdivided into two categories, what we could call ‘Spanish terror’ or the supernatural explained, best epitomised by Spain’s only early writer to practise the Gothic assiduously, Pascual Pérez Rodríguez, and the non-supernatural anti-Inquisition novel, exemplified by Luis Gutiérrez’s Cornelia Bororquia (1801) and Joseph Blanco White’s Vargas: A Tale of Spain (1822). Pérez Rodríguez’s text is indicative of the type of cultural adaptation the British and French Gothic novel experienced in the early-nineteenth century, whilst Gutiérrez and Blanco White’s belong, in their revolutionary spirit, to anticlerical fiction.

PART II: FROM ROMANTICISM TO THE FIN-DE-SIÈCLE (1834–1900)

Chapter 3. Spanish Romanticism and the Gothic
Chapter 3 looks at the Romantic movement, which, like the Gothic, is thought to have never really taken off in Spain. Whilst it is true that Romanticism was not as successful in Spain as it was in other European countries, José de Espronceda’s work, its most obvious exponent, shows a clear Gothic sensibility. I turn to his El estudiante de Salamanca / The Student of Salamanca (1840), a long poem that updates the trope of the dead lover, to explore the imagery and value of this mode for him. I then move on to consider the work of Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer, whose Gothic legends, published in the late 1850s and early 1860s, have been largely ignored by Gothic Studies, and yet, constitute a perfect example of Spanish-European folkloric Gothic.

Chapter 4. From the 1860s to the Fin-de-Siècle: The Development of the Gothic Short Story
In chapter 4, I consider the ambivalent horror of Rafael Serrano Alcázar, Pedro de Alarcón – author of the first short story in Spanish literature to call itself a horror story (‘cuento de miedo’) – and the feminist Gothic of Emilia Pardo Bazán. Although often read as fantastic writers, their short stories abound with Gothic themes and tropes well-established by the late-nineteenth century. I also focus on the way in which some of the Gothic stories of this time, especially those written by Justo Sanjurjo López de Gomara, developed a small strand of mad science fiction. These stories continue the development of the Gothic as an artistic mode that allowed writers to voice contemporary social concerns, like the role and effects of modern science and technology.

PART III: MODERN AND CONTEMPORARY GOTHIC LITERATURE (1900–2016)

Chapter 5. The Twentieth Century (1900–75): Modernist Spiritualism and Political Gothic
Chapter 5 begins by concentrating on the spiritualist movement of the early-twentieth century, especially the ‘folletín’ (penny dreadful) occult-spiritualist hybrids of Emilio Carrère, as an example of the modern Gothic. Carrère’s writing, popular but in the critical periphery, experimented with content and violence in innovative ways. Naturally, the outbreak of the Civil War in 1936 affected writing of all kinds, but Alfonso Sastre, whose Lugubrious Nights (1964) I study here, was very socially committed. His book also includes an interesting preface in which the author attempts to explain the appeal of horror writing. In the second half of this chapter, I focus on what Sastre sees as the radical potential of a dialectic of the imagination, as well as his rethinking of the Gothic.

Chapter 6. From the Death of Franco to the Present: The Establishment of Horror and the Gothic Auteur
Chapter 6 addresses the cultural opening up to the Gothic and the horror genre that followed the death of Franco and the transition years. Specific case studies focus on writers that have consistently developed the Gothic in interesting ways. First, Pilar Pedraza’s brand of the Female Gothic, one that often updates the historical novel and is feminist at heart, is celebrated for its innovation within the context of the Spanish Gothic and of the Gothic more broadly. The second author considered here is Carlos Ruiz Zafón, whose name has come to stand in for the Spanish Gothic more generally. I explore the notion of ‘nuanced Gothicism’ in his work and the intricacies of his internationalisation of a trans/national type of the Gothic.

PART IV: SPANISH GOTHIC CINEMA (1906–2016)

Chapter 7. From Segundo de Chomón to the Rise and Fall of ‘Fantaterror’
Chapter 7 opens with the ground-breaking work of Segundo de Chomón’s trick films and advances swiftly through the early years of the twentieth century to focus on the first cinematic Gothic boom in Spain: fantaterror, a cycle of exploitational horror films made cheaply and with both national and international markets in mind. The period between 1968 and 1980 saw the release of dozens of films, but I concentrate here on the type of monsters that developed from the most notable examples, especially the work of Paul Naschy, and which I divide into two categories: glocal (local yet global) myths, which expand well-known figures like Count Dracula; and ‘national’ monsters, more intrinsic figures like the Blind Dead and Alaric de Marnac, a supernatural vengeful knight based on Gilles de Rais.

Chapter 8. The Post-Millennial Horror Revival: Auteurs, Gothic (Dis)Continuities and National History
Chapter 8 centres on the post-millennial horror revival. It explores the continuities and differences between this new period in filmmaking and fantaterror, focusing on the types of markets and new films. It then focuses on a number of examples that have been key to the development of Spanish Gothic cinema. Guillermo del Toro’s The Devil’s Backbone (2001) and Pan’s Labyrinth (2006) are taken as great transnational examples of how the Gothic can explicitly serve to engage with the repressed national memory of the Spanish Civil War. Finally, I turn to the openly referential Gothic of José Luis Alemán’s Valdemar Legacy films (2010; 2011), and discuss the potential reasons for the commercial and critical failure of his heavily referential version of the Gothic.

CONCLUSION: A LANGUAGE OF COLLABORATION AND LIBERATION
This brief conclusion makes two general propositions. First, it suggests the Gothic needs to be understood as a mode in constant dialogue between nations, that is, as a truly transnational mode. Second, it suggests that the Gothic may be best understood as a language of artistic liberation, sometimes very politically engaged, that has been an inherent part of Spanish culture since the late-eighteenth century.

Horror is unlike any other literary genre. It seeks to provoke uniquely strong reactions like fea... more Horror is unlike any other literary genre. It seeks to provoke uniquely strong reactions like fear, shock, dread or disgust, and yet, remains very popular. It also crosses media, manifesting in narrative forms such as graphic novels and video games. Its characters and trends routinely escape the confines of given texts and become part of the zeitgeist. Of course, horror is most readily associated with the film industry, but horrific short stories and novels have been wildly loved by readers for well over two centuries. Despite its persistent popularity, there is no up-to-date history of horror fiction for the general reader.
This ground-breaking new book is the first comprehensive history of horror fiction to take readers from the first Gothic novel in 1764 to the ‘new weird’, and beyond, in the early twenty-first century. It offers a chronological overview of the genre in fiction and explores its development and mutations over the past 250 years. It also challenges the common misjudgement that horror fiction is necessarily frivolous or dispensable. Leading experts on Gothic and horror literature introduce readers to classics of the genre as well as exciting texts they may not have encountered before.
The topics examined include: horror’s roots in the Gothic romance and antebellum American fiction; the penny dreadful and sensation novels of Victorian England; fin-de-siècle ghost stories; decadent fiction and the weird; the familial horrors of the Cold War era; the publishing boom of the 1980s; the establishment of contemporary horror auteurs; and the post-millennial zombie trend.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction: What, Why and When Is Horror?
Xavier Aldana Reyes

Chapter 1. Gothic and the Cultural Sources of Horror, 1740–1820
Dale Townshend

Chapter 2. American Horror: Origins and Early Trends
Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet

Chapter 3. Horror in the Nineteenth Century: Dreadful Sensations, 1820–1880
Royce Mahawatte

Chapter 4. Transitions: From Victorian Gothic to Modern Horror, 1880–1932
Roger Luckhurst

Chapter 5. Horror Fiction from the Decline of Universal Horror to the Rise of the Psycho Killer
Bernice M. Murphy

Chapter 6. The Rise of Popular Horror, 1971–2000
Steffen Hantke

Chapter 7. Post-Millennial Horror, 2000–16
Xavier Aldana Reyes

Further Critical Reading

*Sample pages in publisher link* This interdisciplinary book brings together work on abjection, ... more *Sample pages in publisher link*

This interdisciplinary book brings together work on abjection, disgust, cognition, phenomenology, pain studies and film theory to make a significant contribution to the study of Horror and its affective workings. Focusing on the three main experiential levels – the representational, the emotional and the somatic – Aldana Reyes proposes an affective-corporeal model of Horror that sees viewership as eminently carnal and threat as the genre’s key emotional state. Using recent, post-millennial examples throughout, the book also offers case studies of films such as Hostel, [REC], Martyrs, Snuff-Movie, Ginger Snaps and My Bloody Valentine 3D, and considers contemporary Horror strands such as found footage, torture porn, the New French Extremity and 3D horror.

Table of Contents

Introduction: The Affective-Corporeal Dimensions of Horror
Horror Film and Affect
Horror Film and the Body
This Book
Notes
Bibliography
Filmography

Chapter 1. Representation: Abjection, Disgust and the (Un)Gendered Body
Gender, Abjection and the Limitations of the Monstrous-Feminine Model
Case Study 1: The Female Teenage Body in Ginger Snaps (2000)
Abjection without Psychoanalysis
The Importance of Physical Threat
Abjection as Fearful Disgust
Principal Images of Abjection Understood as Fearful Disgust
Case Study 2: Abjection as Fearful Disgust in Martyrs (2008)
Conclusion: The Relevance of Representation to an Affective-Corporeal Model of Horror
Notes
Bibliography
Filmography

Chapter 2. Emotion: Cognition, Threat and Self-Reflection
Some Cognitivist Approaches to Horror: Acknowledging Emotions
Art-Horror and Carroll’s Thought Theory of Emotions
Physical Threat as Horror’s Defining Emotional State
Case Study 1: Experiencing Fear, or How [•REC] (2007) Works
Anticipation and Reaction to Threat: Dread and Survival Suspense
Complex Self-Reflective Cognitive Processes: Shame and Guilt
Case Study 2: Snuff-Movie (2005) and the Complicit Morbid Viewer
Conclusion: The Relevance of Emotion to an Affective-Corporeal Model of Horror
Notes
Bibliography
Filmography

Chapter 3. Somatics: Startles, Somatic Empathy and Viewer Alignment
Visual and Acoustic Assaults: The Startle Effect
Case Study 1: Direct Attack of the Viewer in My Bloody Valentine 3D (2009)
Identification and the Masochistic Viewer
Corporeal Identification: Somatic Empathy
Sensation Mimicry and Cinematic Pain
Case Study 2: Viewer Alignment and the Torture Scene in Hostel (2005)
Conclusion: The Relevance of Somatics to an Affective-Corporeal Model of Horror
Notes
Bibliography
Filmography

Conclusion

Series: International Library of the Moving Image, Oct 18, 2015

Table of contents: INTRODUCTION 1. Linnie Blake and Xavier Aldana Reyes, ‘Horror in the... more Table of contents:

INTRODUCTION

1. Linnie Blake and Xavier Aldana Reyes, ‘Horror in the Digital Age’

SECTION 1. HAUNTED TECHNOLOGIES AND NETWORK PANIC

1. Steffen Hantke, ‘Network Anxiety: Prefiguring Digital Anxieties in the American Horror Film’
2. Steve Jones, ‘Torture Pornopticon: (In)security Cameras, Self-Governance and Autonomy’
3. Steen Christiansen, ‘Uncanny Cameras and Network Subjects’
4. Neal Kirk, ‘Networked Spectrality: In Memorium, Pulse and Beyond’

SECTION 2. DIGITAL HORROR AND THE POST/NATIONAL

5. Linnie Blake and Mary Ainslie, 'Digital Witnessing and Trauma Testimony in Ghost Game: Cambodian Genocide, Digital Horror and the Nationalism of New Thai Cinema’
6. Dejan Ognjanović, ‘“Welcome to the Reality Studio": Serbian Hand-Held Horrors’
7. Zeynep Sahinturk, ‘Djinn in the Machine: Technology and Islam in Turkish Horror Film’
8. Mark Freeman, ‘An Uploadable Cinema: Digital Horror and the Postnational Image’

SECTION 3. DIGITAL STYLISTICS

9. Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet, ‘Night Vision in the Contemporary Horror Film’
10. James Aston, ‘Nightmares outside the Mainstream: August Underground and Reel/Real Horror’
11. Xavier Aldana Reyes, ‘The [•REC] Films: Affective Possibilities and Stylistic Limitations of Found Footage Horror'"

The gothic, particularly in its contemporary incarnations, is often constructed around largely di... more The gothic, particularly in its contemporary incarnations, is often constructed around largely disembodied concepts such as spectrality or the haunted. Body Gothic offers a counter-narrative that reinstates the importance of viscerality to the gothic mode. It argues that contemporary discourses surrounding our bodies are crucial to our understanding of the social messages in fictional mutilation and of the pleasures we may derive from it. This book considers a number of literary and cinematic movements that have, over the past three decades, purposely turned the body into a meaningful gothic topos. Each chapter in Body Gothic is dedicated to a different corporeal subgenre: splatterpunk, body horror, the new avant-pulp, the slaughterhouse novel, torture porn and surgical horror are all covered in its pages. Close readings of key texts by Clive Barker, Richard Laymon, Joseph D'Lacey, Matthew Stokoe, Tony White or Stanly Manly are provided alongside in-depth analyses of landmark films such as Re-Animator (1985), The Fly (1986), Saw (2004), Hostel (2005), The Human Centipede (2011) and American Mary (2012).

Table of Contents

Introduction: From Gothic Bodies to Body Gothic

Chapter 1. Splatterpunk
Chapter 2. Body Horror
Chapter 3. The New Avant-Pulp
Chapter 4. The Slaughterhouse Novel
Chapter 5. Torture Horror
Chapter 6. Surgical Horror

Conclusion: Corporeal Readings

Book Series by Xavier Aldana Reyes

HORROR STUDIES - NEW SERIES Horror Studies, from the University of Wales Press, is the first b... more HORROR STUDIES - NEW SERIES

Horror Studies, from the University of Wales Press, is the first book series exclusively dedicated to the study of the genre in its various manifestations – from fiction to cinema and television, magazines to comics, and extending to other forms of narrative texts such as video games or music. Horror Studies aims to raise the profile of Horror and to further its academic institutionalisation by providing a publishing home for cutting-edge research. As an exciting new venture within UWP’s established Cultural Studies and Literary Criticism programme, Horror Studies will expand the field in innovative and student-friendly ways.

Individual titles will ideally be:

• Original monographs or edited collections of around 80,000 words.

• Primarily aimed at scholars and students.

• National, international or transnational in scope.

• Interdisciplinary, where appropriate.

Possible individual titles might explore:

• Underresearched Horror periods, figures and texts.

• Key Horror periods, figures and texts in need of repositioning or rethinking.

• Areas of popular culture beyond the literary, filmic and televisual (i.e. video games, fandom).

• National Horror traditions.

Series editor: Dr Xavier Aldana Reyes, Manchester Metropolitan University

Editorial board:

• Dr Stacey Abbott, Roehampton University

• Dr Linnie Blake, Manchester Metropolitan University

• Professor Harry M. Benshoff, University of North Texas

• Professor Fred Botting, Kingston University

• Professor Steven Bruhm, University of Western Ontario

• Professor Steffen Hantke, Sogang University, Seoul

• Dr Joan Hawkins, Indiana University

• Dr Bernice M. Murphy, Trinity College Dublin

• Professor Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet, University of Lausanne

• Dr Johnny Walker, Northumbria University

Please send initial expressions of interest to Xavier Aldana Reyes (X.Aldana-Reyes@mmu.ac.uk) and Sarah Lewis (s.lewis@press.wales.ac.uk).

Articles and Book Chapters by Xavier Aldana Reyes

The Cambridge Companion to American Horror, ed. by Stephen Shapiro and Mark Storey, 2021

Is all horror ‘body horror’? Can we think of the Horror genre without thinking about the body’s m... more Is all horror ‘body horror’? Can we think of the Horror genre without thinking about the body’s messy and intimate materiality – its blood and guts, its painful vulnerabilities, its inevitable rot and decay? What of the forces that threaten to exceed and transform the apparently inviolable cohesion of our physical state – the monstrous, the freakish, the parasitic, the hybrid? This chapter looks at some of the more queasy manifestations of Horror culture, a mode that foregrounds questions of the body’s (and the reader’s or viewer’s) limits. Despite body horror’s association with recent cinema – the films of David Cronenberg, Tom Six, or Eli Roth, for example – this chapter argues for a longer and more diverse lineage for the term, an attention to embodied experience and its grotesque transformations that can be found in U.S. fiction from Charles Brockden Brown’s spontaneous combustions in Wieland (1798), through the industrial condition novels of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, to the surgical exploration of serial killer mentality in Joyce Carol Oates’s Zombie (1995) and Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho (1991) and the exploration of teenage bodily monstrosity in Charles Burns’s comic series Black Hole (1995-2005).

The Cambridge History of the Gothic, 2020

This chapter begins by considering how debates around the nature and reach of Spanish Romanticism... more This chapter begins by considering how debates around the nature and reach of Spanish Romanticism have been shaped by Spain’s peripheral location in the cartography of western modernity. With both Romanticism and the Gothic traditionally seen as emanating from northern Europe, Spain was labelled Romantic and Gothic rather than a generator of either. As we shall argue, however, the production of a Spanish Gothic and its imbrication with Romanticism was a more complex and to a certain extent ‘natural’ matter given the late development of both movements due to a strong literary censorship that did not lift until the 1830s.

We begin by considering the role of early translations of work by British and French authors in creating a literary Gothic language before turning to the output of indigenous writers such as Agustin Pérez Zaragoza, Pascual Pérez Rodríguez and José de Espronceda, as well as the development of the folletín (penny dreadful) in the 1840s. Long after the heyday of Romanticism, Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer published his highly Gothic historical legends (1857-1871). Bécquer’s successful foray into the genre became the blueprint against which all other efforts were measured – leaving them judged derivative in the same way Spanish Romanticism was seen as an incomplete copy. We turn to his work in the second half of this chapter and then consider how the Gothic legend continued to be cultivated in the closing decades of the century by Realist stalwarts like Emilia Pardo Bazán or Vicente Blasco Ibañez, increasingly informed by a fin-de-siècle sensibility. Similarly, the mad doctors that inhabit the stories of José Fernández Bremón and Justo S. López de Gomara signal a break from early Romantic imaginings and a shift towards twentieth-century Gothic/science fiction hybrids.

The New Urban Gothic, ed. by Ruth Heholt and Holly-Gale Millette (Palgrave Macmillan), 2019

Since the 1992 Olympic Games, Barcelona has become well-known for its tourist industry, and its p... more Since the 1992 Olympic Games, Barcelona has become well-known for its tourist industry, and its perpetual good weather and busy streets seem, at least initially, to make it an unlikely location for the gloomy events of throwback Gothic fictions. This article takes issue with the artificiality of this constructed Barcelona (as well as that of its self-professed Gothic Quarter) and connects it to Carlos Ruiz Zafón’s The Cemetery of Books series (2001–16), which have thoroughly Gothicised the city and retrojected Gothic mysteries to the years during and following the Spanish Civil War. The Barcelona depicted in Ruiz Zafón’s books, I argue, is a personal one that is also political in the debt it pays to the silenced memory of the victims of the Francoist regime and to the impact this dictatorship still has on regional identity.

This essay begins by considering the specifics of Ruiz Zafón’s Gothicisation of Barcelona, especially his use of the pathetic fallacy, and suggests that his artificial version of the city cannot be understood outside of his recuperation of the cruelty of the Spanish Civil War. Under this light, Ruiz Zafón’s books emerge as not just fictional companions to the filmic work of directors like Guillermo del Toro or Juan Carlos Medina or of the desire to exorcise the demons of the repressed past. Instead, Ruiz Zafón’s novels constitute a form of the urban Gothic that deliberately breaks with the silence still surrounding the war and asks questions about the relationship between Catalan nationalism and Francoist oppression, about how the repressed past inhabits and haunts the present.

The Palgrave Handbook of Contemporary Gothic, ed. by Clive Bloom, 2020

This chapter concentrates on ‘body horror’, a type of fiction or cinema where corporeality consti... more This chapter concentrates on ‘body horror’, a type of fiction or cinema where corporeality constitutes the main site of fear, anxiety and disgust. These states involve the inscription of horror onto the human body by virtue of a change, or series of them, that transforms the perceived ‘normal’ body into an exceptional and/or painful version of itself. The chapter explores the role of abjection in the modern Gothic. It first considers key late twentieth-century figures like David Cronenberg and Clive Barker, and then turns its attention to twenty-first-century developments, especially new monstrous-feminines and the controversial torture porn phenomenon.

Abusões journal, 2020

Interview by Ana Resende and André Cardoso for Revista Abusões on recent research in Gothic and H... more Interview by Ana Resende and André Cardoso for Revista Abusões on recent research in Gothic and Horror Studies.

Gothic Film: An Edinburgh Companion, 2020

This chapter traces the mainstreaming of horror throughout the late twentieth and twenty-first ce... more This chapter traces the mainstreaming of horror throughout the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries. It begins with the decline of Hammer Horror in the early 1970s and moves on to explore the popularity and mutations of the Gothic in its contemporary and post-millennial contexts. Although the focus remains England and America, landmark films from countries such as Spain are also considered where appropriate. The subgenres surveyed include body horror, the slasher and neo-slasher, torture porn and found footage horror. Adaptations of Gothic monster films are left out, since these are covered elsewhere in the collection.

Patrick McGrath and His Worlds, ed. by Matthew Foley and Rebecca Duncan, 2019

In this chapter, I interview Patrick McGrath about his forthcoming novel, which is set in Spain a... more In this chapter, I interview Patrick McGrath about his forthcoming novel, which is set in Spain and deals with the legacy of the country’s civil war conflict of 1936–1939. In questions and responses that range—as McGrath’s novels range—across a number of periods and cultural contexts, the conversation both explores the author’s current interest in Spain and embeds this project within the wider scope of his corpus, mapping connections between his present work and earlier English and American novels. As it does this, the chapter shows that links between these sites in McGrath’s literary imaginary often take shape in figures—like that of the ghost, for example—which are legible in gothic terms.

The Edinburgh to Gothic and the Arts, ed. by David Punter, 2019

This chapter investigates the increasingly popular world of the Gothic on screen, as well as the ... more This chapter investigates the increasingly popular world of the Gothic on screen, as well as the inherently ambiguous nature of this label within the filmic context. It explores what Gothic cinema might be (a mode with its own aesthetic and tropic markers that often manifests in the horror genre but which may also feel at home within the narrative parameters of the melodrama) and provides a survey of its most notable manifestations, from the early films of Georges Méliès to Guillermo del Toro’s Crimson Peak (2015). The chapter understands the Gothic to be a transnational filmic mode that may be found in a number of countries that have nurtured it under different circumstances. The first part of the chapter covers early cinema, German Expressionism, Universal and Hammer’s horror outputs and the main European Gothic horror cycles of the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. The second part of the chapter focuses on changes and developments in Gothic cinema since the 1970s: the mainstreaming of supernatural horror, via The Exorcist (1973) and some of the key slashers, new turn-of-the-century ghosts and the rise of found footage horror and possession films in the twenty-first century. The overall aim is to portray Gothic cinema as a distinctive artistic mode, in this case from the perspective of Film Studies, which is simultaneously coloured by the affective drives of the horror genre.