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This thoroughly expanded and updated edition provides a series of stimulating insights into Gothic writing, its history and genealogy. The addition of 12 new essays and a section on 'Global Gothic' reflects the direction Gothic criticism has taken over the last decade.

This exciting exploration of Stephen King's digital writing maneuvers and electronic ventures on online platforms and e-readers unravels the author's latest writing techniques and justifies his unprecedented success in the new millennium. It investigates the latest additions to the Master of Horror's \"toolbox\" by studying King's media presence and writing oeuvre in the twenty-first century through online projects, such as his videogame Discordia. The book closely traces King's shifts from print to the digital as he crafts his stories to share with his constant readers. Its examination of King's re-vitalized Gothic sheds light on his shift towards new realizations that take into consideration the needs and tastes of the contemporary consuming public in a constant dialogue with their contemporary fears and anxieties.While exploring King's literary generic and technological crossovers, the book stresses the need for an encompassing theory that takes into account literary tradition, norms, and motifs adjusted according to the materialities and technological specificities of each medium in specific socio-cultural and economic contexts.

Prior studies of post-war American Gothic literature (and even American horror films) have primarily interpreted Gothic cultural production of the post-war period through a Cold War lens. Despite legitimate reasons for such an approach, this emphasis has limited inquiries into post-war fiction as well as our understanding of the nation's complicated identity. While the federal government and its investigative agencies may have been preoccupied with the so-called 'red menace' that threatened to spread across the planet, each region of the country already possessed major strains of Gothic fiction that focused on regional anxieties – namely of those connected to women and minorities that threatened the region's constructed identity and balance of power. The Haunted States of America shifts the focus to these Gothic strains by examining how the anxieties, fears and concerns illustrated in the works of several post-World War II writers can be best understood through regional history and identity.

Argues that Jackson's anticipation of postmodernism ranks her among the most significant writers of her time.

Gothic as a form of fiction-making has played a major role in Western culture since the late eighteenth century. In this volume, fourteen world-class experts on the Gothic provide thorough and revealing accounts of this haunting-to-horrifying type of fiction from the 1760s (the decade of The Castle of Otranto, the first so-called 'Gothic story') to the end of the twentieth century (an era haunted by filmed and computerized Gothic simulations). Along the way, these essays explore the connections of Gothic fictions to political and industrial revolutions, the realistic novel, the theatre, Romantic and post-Romantic poetry, nationalism and racism from Europe to America, colonized and post-colonial populations, the rise of film and other visual technologies, the struggles between 'high' and 'popular' culture, changing psychological attitudes towards human identity, gender and sexuality, and the obscure lines between life and death, sanity and madness. The volume also includes a chronology and guides to further reading.

In a thoughtful, well-informed study exploring fiction from throughout Stephen King's immense oeuvre, Heidi Strengell shows how this popular writer enriches his unique brand of horror by building on the traditions of his literary heritage. Tapping into the wellsprings of the gothic to reveal contemporary phobias, King invokes the abnormal and repressed sexuality of the vampire, the hubris of Frankenstein, the split identity of the werewolf, the domestic melodrama of the ghost tale. Drawing on myths and fairy tales, he creates characters who, like the heroic Roland the Gunslinger and the villainous Randall Flagg, may either reinforce or subvert the reader's childlike faith in society. And in the manner of the naturalist tradition, he reinforces a tension between the free will of the individual and the daunting hand of fate. Ultimately, Strengell shows how King shatters our illusions of safety and control: \"King places his decent and basically good characters at the mercy of indifferent forces, survival depending on their moral strength and the responsibility they may take for their fellow men.\"

Scare Tactics identifies an important but overlooked tradition of supernatural writing by American women. Jeffrey Weinstock analyzes this tradition as an essentially feminist attempt to imagine alternatives to a world of limited possibilities. In the process, he recovers the lives and works of authors who were important during their lifetimes and in the development of the American literary tradition, but who are not recognized today for their contributions. Between the end of the Civil War and roughly 1930, hundreds of uncanny tales were published by women in the periodical press and in books. These include stories by familiar figures such as Edith Wharton, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, as well as by authors almost wholly unknown to twenty-first-century readers, such as Josephine Dodge Bacon, Alice Brown, Emma Frances Dawson, and Harriet Prescott Spofford. Focusing on this tradition of female writing offers a corrective to the prevailing belief within American literary scholarship that the uncanny tale, exemplified by the literary productions of Irving, Poe, and Hawthorne, was displaced after the Civil War by literary realism. Beyond the simple existence of an unacknowledged tradition of uncanny literature by women, Scare Tactics makes a strong case that this body of literature should be read as a specifically feminist literary tradition. Especially intriguing, Weinstock demonstrates, is that women authors repeatedly used Gothic conventions to express discontentment with circumscribed roles for women creating types of political intervention connected to the broader sphere of women's rights activism. Paying attention to these overlooked authors helps us better understand not only the literary marketplace of their time, but also more familiar American Gothicists from Edgar Allan Poe to Shirley Jackson to Stephen King.

Richard Matheson (1926–2013) was a prolific author and screenwriter whose career helped shape the horror and fantasy genres in literature, film, and television for over sixty years. Matheson authored more than ninety short stories and dozens of novels, many of which—including I Am Legend, A Stir of Echoes, What Dreams May Come, The Shrinking Man, Hell House, and Bid Time Return—have been adapted into feature films. Despite his extensive body of work and influence, however, Matheson has remained largely outside the scope of academic scrutiny. The essays in Reading Richard Matheson: A Critical Survey provide the first critical overview of Matheson’s texts, covering seven of Matheson’s novels, a sampling of short stories, and several adaptations for both film and television. The essays are arranged thematically and address the sociopolitical anxieties reflected in Matheson’s oeuvre; consider his precursors and successors; and situate him within narrative traditions of mythology, cinema, genre, and memory studies. By providing an overview of his career, Reading Richard Matheson illustrates how a commercial writer can contribute to academic discourses of literature and film. Though the essays use a variety of theoretical frameworks, the crossover nature of the collection reflects the broad range of Matheson’s output. As such, this volume will appeal to fans of Matheson’s work in general as well as scholars of literature, film studies, cultural studies, genre studies, media studies, memory studies, and popular culture.

Having endured an initially frigid critcal reception, personal struggles with addiction, and a mid-life accident that nearly killed him, Stephen King continues to reign as perhaps the most popular and prolific writer in America. This new edition of the critical companion to his works includes an expanded biographical chapter, featuring King's return to writing after his accident and his groundbreaking experiments in e-publishing. A full chapter is devoted to each of his eight most recently published works of fiction, offering thorough critical treatments of • Desperation (1996) • The Green Mile (1997) • The Regulators (1996) • Dark Tower IV: Wizard and Glass (1997) • Bag of Bones (1998) • The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon (1999) • Hearts in Atlantis (1999 • Dreamcatcher (2001) Discussions of character development, thematic concerns, and issues of style and symbolism follow concise plot synopses. An alternate critical perspective is offered for each work. King achievements and placement in the horror genre are reconsidered, especially in light of his more recent forays into suspense fiction, science fiction, fantasy, and other areas of writing. The volume includes a selective list of further suggested readings includes biographical sources, general criticism, and reviews.