The Edinburgh Companion to Gothic and the Arts, edited by David Punter

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Edinburgh Companion to Gothic and the Arts ed. by David Punter Aviva Briefel (bio) The Edinburgh Companion to Gothic and the Arts, edited by David Punter; pp. xx + 520. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019, $195.00, £150.00. In the opening to his monumental anthology on art and the gothic, David Punter signals that there is one question the volume will not answer: “What is the Gothic?” What the book attempts instead is to illustrate how the gothic “has inflected form and meaning across a huge range of cultural discourses, from medieval architecture to contemporary gaming; from graveyard poetry to modern dance; from the eighteenth-century novel to internet fiction” (1). In its content, scope, and form, The Edinburgh Companion to Gothic and the Arts fulfills its promise of capaciousness, which rivals and in many ways exceeds that of Punter’s voluminous A New Companion to the Gothic (2012). His skill as an editor in both volumes is to gather and exhibit an assortment of writings on the gothic that allow the reader to experience as well as learn about the excesses of the genre (or is it a mode? a form? The jury is still out). By the time we exit the book’s gallery of horrors, we have become acclimated to—but are still fascinated by—its collision of genres, historical periods, and interpretations. The volume distributes its thirty-three essays into five sections: Architectural Arts, Visual Arts, Music and Performance Arts, Literary Arts, and Media and Cultural Arts. While there is some slippage between these categories—the gothic, after all, is notorious for not staying in its lane—they provide enough structure for the chapters and sections to build on each other. Each of these sections features stand-out pieces that offer promising new directions for the study of the gothic. These include Sara Wasson’s chapter in the architecture section, “Gothic and the Built Environment,” which contends that “although the built environment is created by human beings, it can paradoxically be deathly to the human, yet simultaneously host to unnatural ‘life’, to an alien and malevolent agency” (36). Wasson traces this idea from Edmund Burke’s concept of the sublime through the Victorian urban gothic of Richard Marsh, Robert Louis Stevenson, Bram Stoker, and Arthur Machen, before moving on to the twenty-first-century writings of Alasdair Gray and China Miéville and to our all-too-current “architectures of incarceration” (46). Another exceptional chapter is Kendra Preston Leonard’s “Gothic and Music: Scoring ‘Silent’ Spectres,” which raises the fascinating question of what ghosts sound like. In pursuing this subject, Leonard takes us through the rappings of the séance to the musical accompaniments of early spectral cinema, including Georges Méliès’s Le Manoir du Diable (1896). The Music and Performance Arts section also contains an excellent piece by Steven Bruhm on the gothic and dance, which begins with a resonant claim that will stay with me for a while: “The Gothic is in large part a choreography. Drawing upon the allegorical feel of the romance tradition whose genre it adopted, Gothic narrative is the stylised spectacle of bodies moving through large emotions or mental states, conveying through grand gestures a limited set of primal, dramatic emotions” (214). Finally, Clive [End Page 431] Bloom’s wonderful essay on gothic melodrama in Victorian theater takes us on a gripping tour of the “excessive staging” and colorful history of this theatrical tradition (354). Bloom’s is one of several essays in the collection that contribute to the ever-growing body of Victorian scholarship on the gothic. These include Tom Duggett’s chapter on the influence of the Lake Poets on John Ruskin and William Morris’s writings on gothic architecture; Kamilla Elliott’s essay on the trope of the gothic portrait in novels including Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist (1839), Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret (1862), and Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890); and Jerrold E. Hogle’s essay on abjection and the “Gothic image” in narratives such as Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847) and Dickens’s Great Expectations (1860). Other chapters position Victorian texts in...