Mary Shelley's Frankenstein was conceived against the backdrop of rapid change in the scientific world. And the science that inspired it is almost as strange as the novel itself. Shelley grew up surrounded by several of Europe's prominent scientific thinkers and was familiar with experimentation into reanimation of corpses as well as the heated debate over "the elixir of life". She was a frequent visitor to St Bart's operating theatre, where spectators witnessed surgery performed without anaesthetic. Her monster was born in an era of bodysnatching, dissections and the philosophy of Vitalism. This book offers an engrossing insight into the world of science in late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth-century Europe, through the prism of the seminal science fiction novel. Illustrated with line drawings and colour plates, it reveals how the monster was conceived, suggests the real-life basis for Victor Frankenstein and describes in vivid detail the experiments that might have led to the Creature's birth. It also looks at incarnations of the monster since the book was published and modern interpretations of the "mad scientist", as well as looking ahead to permanent bionic limbs, implants and other wonders.

Gothic Science Fiction explores the fascinating world of gothic influenced science fiction. From Frankenstein to Doctor Who and from H. G Wells to Stephen King, the book charts the rise of a genre and follows the descent into darkness that consumes it.

This book brings together the author's interviews with many prominent figures in fantasy, horror, and science fiction to examine the traditions and extensions of the gothic mode of storytelling over the last 200 years and its contemporary influence on film and media.

Gothic fiction's focus on the irrational and supernatural would seem to conflict with science fiction's rational foundations. However, as this novel collection demonstrates, the two categories often intersect in rich and revealing ways. Analyzing a range of works—including literature, film, graphic novels, and trading card games—from the past three decades through the lens of this hybrid genre, this volume examines their engagement with the era's dramatic changes in communication technology, medical science, and personal and global politics.

New Author and collections. A deluxe edition of super-charged, original and classic short stories. Dystopia, Post-Apocalypse, time travel, robots and more this brilliant collection brings together the best of today's writers (many stories previously unpublished), with an eclectic range of science fiction masters including H. Rider Haggard, Stanley G. Weinbaum, Philip Frances Nowlan, Edward Page Mitchell and Jack London. An eclectic collection of SF adventure tales. New, contemporary and notable writers featured are: Adrian Ludens, Alexis A. Hunter, Beth Cato, Conor Powers-Smith, M. Darusha Wehm, David Tallerman, Donald Jacob Uitvlugt, Kate O'Connor, Mike Morgan, Nemma Wollenfang, Rob Hartzell, Sarah Hans, Patrick Tumblety, Stewart C Baker, Brian Trent, Jacob M. Lambert, Rachael K. Jones, Zach Shephard, Keyan Bowes, and Edward Ahern.

This book examines how Wilkie Collins’s interest in medical matters developed in his writing through exploration of his revisions of the late eighteenth-century Gothic novel from his first sensation novels to his last novels of the 1880s. Throughout his career, Collins made changes in the prototypical Gothic scenario. The aristocratic villains, victimized maidens and medieval castles of classic Gothic tales were reworked and adapted to thrill his Victorian readership. With the advances of neuroscience and the development of criminology as a significant backdrop to most of his novels, Collins drew upon contemporary anxieties and increasingly used the medical to propel his criminal plots. While the prototypical castles were turned into modern medical institutions, his heroines no longer feared ghosts but the scientist’s knife. This study hence underlines the way in which Collins’s Gothic revisions increasingly tackled medical questions, using the medical terrain to capitalize on the readers’ fears. It also demonstrates how Wilkie Collins’s fiction reworks Gothic themes and presents them through the prism of contemporary scientific, medical and psychological discourses, from debates revolving around mental physiology to those dealing with heredity and transmission. The book’s structure is chronological covering a selection of texts in each chapter, with a balance between discussion of the more canonical of Collins’s texts such as The Woman in White, The Moonstone and Armadale and some of his more neglected writings.

Examining the automatic writing of the spiritualist séances, discursive technologies like the telegraph and the photograph, various genres and late nineteenth-century mental science, this book shows the failure of writers' attempts to use technology as a way of translating the supernatural at the fin de siècle. Hilary Grimes shows that both new technology and explorations into the ghostly aspects of the mind made agency problematic. When notions of agency are suspended, Grimes argues, authorship itself becomes uncanny. Grimes's study is distinct in both recognizing and crossing strict boundaries to suggest that Gothic literature itself resists categorization, not only between literary periods, but also between genres. Treating a wide range of authors - Henry James, Rudyard Kipling, Arthur Conan Doyle, George Du Maurier, Vernon Lee, Mary Louisa Molesworth, Sarah Grand, and George Paston - Grimes shows how fin-de-siècle works negotiate themes associated with the Victorian and Modernist periods such as psychical research, mass marketing, and new technologies. With particular attention to texts that are not placed within the Gothic genre, but which nevertheless conceal Gothic themes, The Late Victorian Gothic demonstrates that the end of the nineteenth century produced a Gothicism specific to the period.

New English translation of this “demise of the human race” story.

THE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GOTHIC “Well written and interesting [it is] a testament to the breadth and depth of knowledge about its central subject among the more than 130 contributing writers, and also among the three editors, each of whom is a significant figure in the field of gothic studies ... A reference work that’s firmly rooted in and actively devoted to expressing the current state of academic scholarship about its area.” New York Journal of Books “A substantial achievement.” Reference Reviews Comprehensive and wide-ranging, The Encyclopedia of the Gothic brings together over 200 newly-commissioned essays by leading scholars writing on all aspects of the Gothic as it is currently taught and researched, along with challenging insights into the development of the genre and its impact on contemporary culture. The A-Z entries provide comprehensive coverage of relevant authors, national traditions, critical developments, and notable texts that continue to define, shape, and inform the genre. The volume’s approach is truly interdisciplinary, with essays by specialist international contributors whose expertise extends beyond Gothic literature to film, music, drama, art, and architecture. From Angels and American Gothic to Wilde and Witchcraft, The Encyclopedia of the Gothic is the definitive reference guide to all aspects of this strange and wondrous genre. The Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Literature is a comprehensive, scholarly, authoritative, and critical overview of literature and theory comprising individual titles covering key literary genres, periods, and sub-disciplines. Available both in print and online, this groundbreaking resource provides students, teachers, and researchers with cutting-edge scholarship in literature and literary studies.

Some topics and literary figures discussed are: American Gothic, Ambrose Bierce, Charles Dickens, Gothic architecture, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Contemporary Gothic, Occultism, Robert Louis Stevenson, Witches and witchcraft, Spiritualism, Oscar Wilde, Gothic film, Ghost stories, and Edgar Allan Poe.