A review by grimondgalgmod
Gothic by Fred Botting

4.0

The first piece of lit crit I've read since getting my BA nearly a decade ago which probably explains why it took me so long to finish. A pretty good survey of mostly British Gothic texts from Horace Walpole to Angela Carter with a killer bibliography and passages that range from the pedantic to the poetic, sometimes in the same sentence. The last chapter is concerned with Gothic adaptations and conventions in film and ends with an excoriating criticism of Francis Ford Coppola's Dracula hysterically titled "The End of Gothic," in which he laments the film's sentimentality and it not being gay enough. I don't think we were watching the same movie. Anyway, I would be interested in an updated edition where Botting absolutely destroys the post-Twilight Paranormal Romance boom and takes a more global look at the Gothic tradition.