Emerging from the shadow of popular reproductions, Frankenstein's importance in debates about gender, culture and politics has been dramatically affected by recent developments in criticism and theory. This volume collects the most significant contemporary work on the novel from Marxist, Psychoanalytic, Historicist, Feminist, Poststructuralist and Postcolonialist perspectives. The book reflects the way that monstrosity in its literary, historical and philosophical context raises crucial questions for modern issues of sexuality, class, science, race, language and identity.

Bataille is the first book of its kind-a lucid guide to reading literary and cultural texts in the light of George Bataille's work. It explores the significance of Bataillean notions such as heterology, transgression, and eroticism through detailed readings of Shakespeare and early modern literature, Gothic and postmodernist fiction, and popular movies. Bataillean concepts are situated in relation to the ideas of Lacan, Derrida, Kristeva, Baudrillard, and Deleuze, and the the significance for both contemporary and futural modes of cultural analysis is explored.

The dark, destructive and monstrous elements of gothic fiction have traditionally been seen in opposition to the rose-tinted idealism of Romanticism. In this ground-breaking study, Fred Botting re-evaluates the relationship between the two genres in order to plot the shifting alignments of popular and literary fictions with cultural theories, consumption and representations of science.

Gothic Romanced traces the history of gothic and romantic writings from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to the present day. It examines the ways in which these genres were aligned...