And this is, as the name suggests, an illustrated history
- illustrated nothing short of sumptuously. This is not a physically big or even a long
book, but it packs in 350 pictures and more. I think there’s a paperback edition, but I
bought the hardback, and what with its heavy, embossed covers and thick, glossy
paper making all those images shine, it’s almost too weighty to hold up in comfort.
The prevalence of the pictures means the writing is brisk and concise, and even
if just occasionally the pell-mell listing of films reflecting this or that
theme gets a bit bewildering, if nothing else you’ll come away with a list of
scary movies you want to look up. The mainstay of the book isn’t literature,
but I was pleased to see Emily Dickinson get a mention: ‘One need not be a Chamber
– to be Haunted’, she warned, and this beautiful book shows how right she was.
Wednesday, 26 January 2022
'Gothic: an Illustrated History' by Roger Luckhurst (Thames & Hudson, 2021)
Do we really need yet another 'history of the Gothic'? What professor
of English Literature at Birkbeck, Roger Luckhurst, does to justify writing one
is to take a strictly analytic and thematic approach, breaking the multifarious
extremity of the Gothic tradition into its constituent elements, into which the
history emerges sidelong and in passing, Horace Walpole rubbing
shoulders with modern film – lots of film, as it turns out, Dr Luckhurst’s
preferred medium for illustrating how the Gothic has morphed into its
contemporary manifestations. He identifies four domains of human thought in which
the Gothic expresses itself – form (buildings and structures), landscape, ‘the
Gothic compass’ (how the Gothic imagination orders the earth and beyond it), and
monstrosity – each of which are then neatly divided into five sub-chapters. Sometimes
these divisions are perhaps overly neat, as Gothic thinking about the far
North and far South turn out not to be that different, and neither are the uncanny
undoings of structure signified by ‘Tentacles’ and ‘Formless[ness]’, but the format
allows Dr Luckhurst to examine ideas and themes in a fruitful way.
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