Gothic: Transmutations of Horror in Late-Twentieth-Century Art

By Joyce Carol Oates

Book Overview

As the 20th century draws to a close, there is a Gothic theme penetrating much of contemporary art and culture. In the 1990s, American and European artists have moved increasingly towards the dark and uncanny side of the human psyche - the theatrical and grotesque, the violent and destructive.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0262071843
• ISBN13: 9780262071840
• Release Date: May 1997
• Publisher: MIT Press (MA)
• Length: 219 Pages
• Weight: 0.20 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 7.0" x 9.8"

Customer Reviews

Finally an intellectual book tor the rest of us

this hardback 219-page book (numbered backwards) is a collector's item. It draws on the last 200 years from history, music, psychoanalysis, film, fashion, architecture, literature, all types of art to describe what "gothic" actually is. Discussions on the influence of industrialization, the Holocaust, the millenium, and Freud are included. I am a profesional/academic who is now much better able to articulate why I am drawn to his thing called gothic and to define what it is. This 9-chapter book with color and B & W photos and appendicies would be an appropriate text for a college course in art, popular culture, etc. Gothic is more than a disturbed adolescent dressed in black.