Gothic: An Illustrated History by Roger Luckhurst (review)

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Reviewed by:

• Gothic: An Illustrated History by Roger Luckhurst
• Amanda L. Alexander

Gothic: An Illustrated History. By Roger Luckhurst. Princeton University Press, 2021. 288 pp.

Gothic: An Illustrated History is a vibrant book for the twenty-first century Gothic scholar. The text’s layout, colorful visuals, and cover all contribute to an enticing experience and live up to the moniker of “an illustrated history.” Luckhurst frames this history around the idea that both material and immaterial qualities of the Gothic have always informed how we encounter its various incarnations.

Each of the text’s four primary sections contains five chapters, all with their own thematic focus related to the section’s category. Luckhurst introduces these sections and essays in the preface as “a collection of ‘travelling tropes’ that, while they originate in a narrow set of European cultures with distinct meanings, have embarked on a journey in which they are both transmitted and utterly transformed as they move across different cultures” (8–9). This early emphasis on the shifting and flexible nature of the Gothic establishes what becomes a well-rounded look at the genre’s transnational appeal across physical and digital media. While both the Enlightenment and Romantic eras feature prominently, covering the traditional Gothic fiction period of 1764–1820, Luck-hurst uses this familiar territory to point readers toward unexpected perspectives, like those of architects or authors of captivity narratives. [End Page 149]

Section 1, “Architecture & Form,” covers material symbols of Gothic aesthetics in “The Pointed Arch,” “Ruins,” “Fragment,” “Labyrinth,” and “House.” Luckhurst gives each trope an introduction, and from there he discusses the religious, cultural, and nationalistic ideas that made each trope “Gothic” in England and Western Europe, before demonstrating how each was re-envisioned globally. A highlight of this section includes a captivating look at the eighteenth-century English fashion for artificially created ruins that leads readers into the all-too-real and pressing images of urban decay in Detroit and nuclear devastation in Chernobyl and Fukushima. The contrast of this essay, from artificial to authentic, underscores a key duality in much of the Gothic—a simultaneous desire for, and fear of, material signs of the past. As Luckhurst’s analysis suggests, artifacts and their histories could be fabricated, but the fears they represent are often not.

Luckhurst next turns to larger, slightly more abstract ideas of space. “The Lie of the Land” gives section 2 its focus, traversing material on “The Country & the City,” “Village,” “Forest,” “Wilderness,” and “Edgelands.” These chapters extend the chronological and spatial diversity of the first section, taking readers from Stoker’s Transylvania to DC’s Gotham. Within these locations, readers find introductions to EcoGothic and Folk Horror alongside concise and informative discussions of how figures like witches and vampires often populate these sites in our cultural imagination.

A noteworthy feature of this section is Luckhurst’s exploration of “Edgelands,” which he describes as the “messy, ill-defined spaces in between: suburbs, satellite towns, ribbon developments, transport corridors, out-of-town shopping malls” (129). This chapter deepens Luck-hurst’s work to examine Gothic from a global perspective. Edgelands shape life from Brazilian gated communities to South Korean provincial villages, and we experience the horror of these places manifest in George A. Romero’s mall zombies in Dawn of the Dead and the aliens of Amat Escalante’s The Untamed (130–31). In his analysis in this section and throughout the text as a whole, Luckhurst does not conceal the racist, classist, and colonialist roots of these topics; rather, he addresses how much of our interpretation of what makes these spaces (and their monsters) Gothic is tied to this history even when the spaces themselves appear external and hostile to it. [End Page 150]

Section 3 orients readers with “The Gothic Compass,” guiding us through “North,” “South,” “East,” “West,” and “Planetary & Cosmic Horror.” Icelandic sagas and British arctic exploration transport us through the northern regions, and we encounter a broad idea of “south” that stretches from the Antarctic to the American Deep South. Luck-hurst reminds us here that American history is itself Gothic, still unable to heal the wounds of chattel slavery, yet he uses this observation to lead...