Body Gothic: Corporeal Transgression in Contemporary Literature and Horror Film

Gothic Literary Studies

by Xavier Aldana Reyes

Ever since horror became wildly popular in the 1970s, journalists have warned against the dangers of increasingly explicit forms of violent entertainment. Xavier Aldana Reyes takes a different stance in Body Gothic , celebrating the transgressive qualities of this genre. Reyes considers relevant popular literary and filmic movements of the past three decades and reads them as updates in a long gothic tradition that goes back to the eighteenth century. Body Gothic contains case studies of key texts in splatterpunk, body horror, the new avant-pulp, the slaughterhouse novel, torture porn, and surgical horror.

Genres: Nonfiction, Horror, Gothic, Film, Theory, Literature

252 pages, Hardcover

First published October 15, 2014

About the author

Xavier is Reader in English Literature and Film at Manchester Metropolitan University, and a founder member of the Manchester Centre for Gothic Studies.

Reviews

[Isaac Jackson Nock · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is written by my dissertation advisor so I am maybe a tiny bit biased but I really enjoyed this! Although academic theory is often quite dense I found this quite easy to read and follow. I think the structure of the book was really good and informative too and gave me a lot to think about in regards to my own dissertation. I particularly enjoyed the chapters on surgical horror - i’m thinking about expanding on some of these ideas in my dissertation - and the chapter on ‘torture porn’ (as the entire chapter was pretty much all about the Saw series)

[Miguel Lupián · Rating 5 out of 5]

Este texto se ha convertido en mi libro de cabecera no sólo para mis cursos de literatura gótica, sino de terror en general. Y ahora con el de body horror en puerta, era obligatoria su relectura. Simplemente perfecto.

[C.M. Rosens · Rating 5 out of 5]

Enjoyed this very much. Wrote a longer blog post about it, summarising the chapters and conclusions in brief, but I’ll do a short version of that here.

First, it’s an academic text, not necessarily intended for a public audience without a basic lit crit background, but it can be read easily and sets out ideas in a clear and succinct way. The commentary on the texts is insightful and illuminating, although the study is not trying to create new ways of looking at corporeality in the gothic but rather offer ideas for future studies to utilise.

I personally found the discussion both interesting and convincing, and Reyes doesn’t talk down to his reader or assume that they have read or seen any of the texts in discussion. I have made a point of avoiding certain film franchises, but Reyes talks through all the salient points in such a way that the narrative arc makes sense (obviously you will be spoiled for all of them) and the commentary is not divorced from its context.

Of the six chapters I was most interested in The New Avant-Pulp, which gave me some new ways to think about pulp novels (and encouraged me to buy a few of them), and Torture Porn, which gave me more food for thought on the nature of horror vs terror and the breaking down of the human body into its constituent parts, an overarching theme of body gothic also picked up on in the Slaughterhouse Novel chapter and the final chapter on Surgical Horror.

While the price of the book is prohibitive to a general audience in the way almost all academic texts are, I enjoyed it as a book outside my discipline and would be interested in monographs & articles that pick up on these ideas and further explore how modern anxieties and sensibilities look at the body in contemporary Gothic fiction. It is meant to be a stepping stone or jumping off point for further detailed considerations, and I think it achieves this aim by clearly showing ways in which shifts in society’s fears have impacted different sub-genres, pointing out overarching themes and how they develop and change over time, and centring the body in the gothic experience.

[Charlotte · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very valuable reading for my thesis. I especially liked the chapter on body horror, as well as the slaughterhouse novel.

[Emma · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of my favourite literary sources I’ve ever read. Only found it to do research and ended up reading the whole thing.