This open access book defines the cinematic Gothic as an aesthetics of memory and exile. Guided by three intersecting concepts memory, travelling, and touch it suggests that the cross-border movements of exiles, émigrés, and professional travellers had a crucial impact on the emergence, development, and dissemination of the Gothic. This approach expands the canon to overlooked films, filmmakers, and national traditions. Drawing on film, memory, and gothic studies, the book urges the reader to think across other disciplines, including phenomenology, neurology, cognitive neuroscience, and disability studies. From hands to pianos, accordions, gloves, amnesia, and wounded bodies, the volume proposes a reappraisal of the Gothic by redrawing its scope, retracing its origins, and refocusing attention on surfaces as sites of socio-political meaning.

This book is open access, which means that you have free and unlimited access Uniquely explores the development of the Gothic cinematic aesthetic in relation to migration, memory, and objects Draws on diverse methodologies and disciplines to create an innovative analytical framework Challenges and extends scholarship in Gothic studies, including case studies of overlooked films and filmmakers

Autorentext

Joana Jacob Ramalho is Lecturer (Teaching) at University College London. Her publications include work on thing theory, radical humour in punk cabaret, gothic musicals, and Ludwig II of Bavaria.

Inhalt

Chapter 1. Introduction: The Gothic Aesthetic.- Chapter 2. Memory as Personal History: Émigrés, Exiles, and Professional Travellers.- Chapter 3. Memory-Objects and Journeys of Re-collection.- Chapter 4. Memory as Touch: The Hand, Amputation, and Sensory Contagion.- Chapter 5. Tactile Travelling, Manual Space, and the Duality of Gothic Hands.- Chapter 6. Pathological Journeys, Gloves, and 'Affect-Logic'.- Chapter 7. Amnesia and Oblivion.- Chapter 8. The Gothic Piano: Elegy to an Absence.- Chapter 9. Conclusion: Routes of Re-membering.