Mash-up: “a mixture or fusion of disparate elements” (OED)

From its beginnings in the 18th century, the gothic was disparaged for its predictable group style and unoriginality. The earliest reviewers and parodists criticized gothic novels for being admixtures of already clichéd gothic scenes thrown in merely to attract fans of the new genre. To this day, the gothic is a paradoxical genre, its outré subject matters seemingly at odds with a tendency to rely on familiar tropes and formulae. All gothic texts are mash-ups to the extent that they are haunted by previous texts. Far from being a failing, this propensity on the part of gothic storytellers to make new stories out of older ones is arguably the genre’s most compelling feature.

Intended for publication with Lexington Books, Gothic Mash-Ups will theorize and trace the way that producers of gothic fiction – from the 18th century to today – appropriate, combine, and reimagine elements from earlier texts and genres. Particularly welcome are essays about individual texts (or groups of texts) that bring together characters and storylines from two or more prior gothic narratives or cross gothic storylines with other kinds of stories. From Walpole’s early generic hodgepodge and Universal Pictures’ monster film crossovers to such contemporary “Frankenfictions” (De Bruin-Molé) as The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and Penny Dreadful, this collection will examine the fundamental hybridity of the gothic as a genre.

Contributors to the collection might focus on (but need not be limited to):

-          First-wave gothic novels as mash-ups

-          Generic hybrids that include gothic elements

-          Victorian and neo-Victorian gothic mash-ups

-          Pirated and plagiarized gothic texts as mash-ups

-          Horror film, video game, or comic book mash-ups

-          Gothic adaptations (broadly understood) as mash-ups

-          Gothic televisual mash-ups like Dark Shadows and Penny Dreadful

-          Gothic crossover fanfiction

-          Critical and reader responses to gothic mash-ups

-          Gothic parodies and satires of / as gothic mash-ups

-          Theoretical approaches to gothic mash-ups

Please send proposed chapter abstracts (400-500 words) and a short biography (200 words) to Natalie Neill (nneill@yorku.ca) by August 30, 2019. Finished chapters (approximately 6,000-7,000 words, including notes and bibliography) will be due by March 30, 2020.

Natalie Neill teaches in the Department of English at York University, where she specializes in nineteenth-century literature and first-year teaching. She has published articles and book chapters on Romantic-period satire, gothic parody, and film adaptations of nineteenth-century novels (among other topics).