Urban Gothic is a subgenre of Gothic fiction, Gothic crime fiction, and television whose narratives spring from discourse on industrial and post-industrial urban society. Often dystopic, it was pioneered in the mid-19th century in Britain and the United States and developed in serialisations such as R. L. Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886); into novels such as Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890). Much has been written on 19th century Anglo-centred Urban Gothic fiction and vampiristic, monstrous Urban Gothic, but less has been written on the 21st century reimagining and re-serialisation of the Urban Gothic in mechanised, altered, disabled, and dystopic states of being. Nor has writing on the Urban Gothic departed from the canonical London location or considered the Urban Gothic as the prime progenitor of the genre of Crime Fiction. The intention, therefore, is for The New Urban Gothic to explore the resurgence in serialised and grotesque narratives of degeneration, ecological and economic ruin, dystopia, mechanised future inequality, and crime narrative as evidenced in literature and new forms of media in an international context. Submissions are welcomed that address the historic specificities of urban difference and Gothic traditions, as well as inter-disciplinary studies and contemporary texts that link urban crime fiction and the Gothic.

Please send a 300-500 word abstract including keywords, along with 50-100 words of biodata to the editors h.millette@soton.ac.uk and ruth.heholt@falmouth.ac.uk by 30 August, 2017.

Deadline for final chapters of no more than 7,500 words (including notes and references): 1 May 2018.

Topics may include (but are not bound by):

• Industrialization, Mechanisation and future dystopia in the Urban Gothic

• New serializations of the Urban Gothic (Dickens – Netflix, etc.)

• Outsiders (Gender, Race, or the Orient) in the New Urban Gothic

• Identity and Belonging in the New Urban Gothic

• Dark Tourism and the New Urban Gothic

• Political Aesthetics (Grotesque) of the New Urban Gothic

• LGBTQi and the New Urban Gothic

• Disability and Mental Health in the New Urban Gothic

• Sci-Fi and the New Urban Gothic in Space.

• Gaming and the New Urban Gothic (X-Box, PS 3, Wii, PC, etc.)

• Graphic Novels and the New Urban Gothic (Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman, Frank Miller, etc.)

• Regional New Urban Gothic (Sheffield, New Orleans, Ontario, etc.)

• Dockside New Urban Gothic (Limehouse, Hong Kong, Gdansk, Liverpool, Vancouver, etc.)

• Japanese New Urban Gothic (or Korean, Chinese, Indian, Canadian etc)