David Punter

University of Bristol | UB · Department of English

David Punter is the author of fifteen academic books, many of which revolve around gothic fiction. The Literature of Terror: The Gothic Tradition(vol. 1-2, 1996) is one of the most relevant manuals about the Gothic published so far. He is also the editor of ten academic volumes, and has taught at universities in different countries and even contine...

It has become something of a cliché to speak of ‘Scottish Gothic’ as though there were one country which could house a certain set of hauntings. But Scotland is, of course, a diverse country, as we have seen over many centuries in its political and religious dealings. In particular, we need to speak together of the industrial – or post-industrial –...

The third volume of The Cambridge History of the Gothic is the first book to provide an in-depth history of Gothic literature, film, television and culture in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries (c. 1896-present). Identifying key historical shifts from the birth of film to the threat of apocalypse, leading international scholars offer comprehe...

This essay has as its focus Horatio Clare’s remarkable book Down to the Sea in Ships, which recounts two voyages the author made on container ships. It also contains some thoughts on David Foster Wallace’s long essay ‘A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again’, and a brief reflection on the author’s own researches in the archives of the SS Great B...

David Punter's The Literature of Terror (1980) is a landmark in Gothic criticism. But, since then, much has changed. For a start, theory has come, and, to an extent, gone, but not without leaving its mark. If 'literary theory' is now less likely to be taught as a separate course in universities, that is because it is otherwise ubiquitous. Gothic, m...

In a recent edition of Atlantic Studies, Hester Blum outlined the methodological approaches appropriate to the emergent field of 'oceanic studies', arguing that such work should prioritise the oceans' material conditions, their 'nonhuman scale and depth' and 'multi-dimensional flux'. Our aims in this essay are twofold: to consider the implications...

This chapter focuses on Lessing’s The Memoirs of a Survivor (1974), with the science-fiction novels Shikasta (1979) and The Marriages between Zones Three, Four and Five (1980), in order to assess her involvement with the future, which underlies all her work. Lessing is constantly involved with thinking the future – with, we might say, how the futur...

The Cambridge Companion to Frankenstein consists of sixteen original essays on Mary Shelley's novel by leading scholars, providing an invaluable introduction to Frankenstein and its various critical contexts. Theoretically informed but accessibly written, this volume relates Frankenstein to various social, literary, scientific and historical contex...

A thread runs through this choice of material, which is that the literature of cult and conspiracy tends to come to the forefront in times of turmoil and perhaps especially when traditional certainties—often theological in nature—are under threat or perceived to be so. The notion of a higher, secret hand organizing and directing events appears part...

In a world of conflicting nationalist claims, mass displacements and asylum-seeking, a great many people are looking for 'home' or struggling to establish the 'nation'. These were also important preoccupations between the English and the French revolutions: a period when Britain was first at war within itself, then achieved a confident if precariou...

Will self-published The Butt: An Exit Strategy in 2008. The narrative appears to be centred on a character called Tom Brodzinski. He is on holiday, with his wife and four children. He seems to be from the United States, although this is never fully confirmed; and the country – or land, or continent, or ex-colony – where the action takes place is ne...

Pity is a huge and complex human emotion; among its elements are a kind of universal pity, more specific pity for the suffering fellow-creature, and self-pity. Bob Dylan’s lyrics constitute a remarkable address to these issues, sometimes directly, sometimes indirectly, in specific contexts: the condition of American history, the plight of the immig...

Traces an entire history of pity, as an emotion and as an element in the arts. Pity represents a combination of fear, helplessness and overwhelming agitation. It is a term which suffuses our everyday lives; it is also a dangerous term hovering between approval of sympathy and disapproval of emotional wallowing (as in 'self-pity'). This book traces...

If there is one thing I would like to demonstrate in this chapter, it is the force of the truism that nationalism — a sense of living, and lived, history — exists only insofar as it is defined by its other. Perhaps we can see this most obviously in the multitude of acts of othering that constitutes the history of place names, which are regularly co...

This essay seeks to explore questions of space, place and time in the American Gothic. It does so by confronting ?America? as a site of hybridity, where surfaces and depths intermingle. American Gothic has a complex relation to European Gothic, as it also does to America's own ?pasts,? whether those involve colonialism, slavery, or more simply the...

A lively and comprehensive account of the whole tradition of European fiction for students and teachers of comparative literature, this volume covers twenty-five of the most significant and influential novelists in Europe from Cervantes to Kundera. Each essay examines an author's use of, and contributions to, the genre and also engages an important...

In a Cathedral CityLying AwakeThe Moon and the Yew TreeWinter TreesReferencesFurther Reading

the ghost of a history, ideas shaping Gothic criticism;Gothic writing, over the last 250 years;contemporary approaches to the Gothic;Gothic writing, a contested site;early writers of the genre, of different genres;field of Gothic writing, viewing the uncertainty;“Gothic” and its meaning, the “Gothic revival”;psychology of Gothic textuality;the Goth...

This article approaches a range of contemporary Scottish fiction: Iain Banks's Complicity and A Song of Stone, Irvine Welsh's Filth, Michel Faber's Under the Skin, James Robertson's Joseph Knight, Alan Guthrie's Savage Night and selected stories from Alan Bissett's Scottish Gothic anthology, Damage Land. The theme the article traces is pity, whethe...

This chapter addresses John Buchan's Prester John and Wilson Harris' The Palace of the Peacock. Among the themes, it touches on definitions of heroism; accounts of the journey; approaches to the exotic; the figure of the adventurer; and the locations of empire. The ‘story’ of The Palace of the Peacock is much harder to describe, since essential ele...

This is a surprising book. One might initially expect to find a run-through of modernist texts with Gothic elements, and wonder how this could fit alongside the admirably comprehensive Gothic Modernisms, edited by Andrew Smith and Jeff Wallace, and published in 2001. But in fact Gothic and Modernism is quite different: it does not attempt to live u...

So it was that Janet saw the male figure as it emerged from deep blackness into lesser blackness. The Moon had granted her wish, had brought her happiness. Crazed and joyful she careered down the stairs and flung herself passionately at the dark figure. There was a dreadful cry of outrage and disgust; she heard a voice hiss, ‘You filthy wee whore’,...

William Burroughs’ texts provide us with one of the most self-conscious of guides through an addicted world which is violently dislocated from linear time, while at the same time undermining the reliability of such a guide. In this Gothicised world we cannot trust the account of the addict; but this also implies that we cannot trust ourselves in th...

To address the notions of terrorism and the uncanny requires a thinking in terms of the unfamiliar, or more specifically of that which brings the unfamiliar into the heartland (or, as we might now refer to it in the era of ‘homeland security’, the homeland) of the family. We might be familiar with the headline ‘Terrorists are also family men’; perh...

The focus of this chapter is a specific museum, or perhaps one should say, since in a sense it no longer exists, the ghost of a museum. It is, or was, one of the most famous museums in the world: the enormous collection of ‘things’, as he called them, amassed by Henry Solomon Wellcome during the first three and a half decades of the twentieth centu...

Talking about the graphic novel poses several difficulties. One, of course, would be about how worthy they may be of academic consideration in the first place; many of the others are, in one way or another, about time. For example, one might ask about the graphic novel as a genre and its relation to the future. There was a time, as it were — and it...

T.H. Vail Motter begins his 1935 study ‘Byron’s Werner Re-estimated’, which remains the longest and arguably the most important monograph on Werner to date, with two extraordinary points about Byron’s least reputed complete play: firstly, it has the longest stage life among Byron’s plays, which amounted to ‘fifty-nine years under five different act...

Lorsque l’on observe les relations qui unissent le Gothique, son étude et la psychanalyse, on constate rapidement que ces trois disciplines relèvent d’une méthode de l’inquiétude ; qu’elles se rejoignent dans la proximité d’une mort dont elles affrontent la perspective ; qu’enfin, elles se rassemblent autour de la hantise et du désir d’outrepasser...

On the subject of Celts and the Celtic, Blake maintains a voluble reticence. That is to say, nowhere in his writings does he mention them by name; yet we know, from a whole panoply of intratextual and extratextual sources, of his close involvement with speculative antiquarianism, with the ‘matter of ancient Britain’, with the whole issue of histori...

Francis Lathom was a novelist and playwright, well-known in his lifetime, but whose reputation died with him. He is best known today for his novel The Midnight Bell (1798) which formed part of the Gothic reading material on which Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey is founded. Lathom is described as a second or third rank Gothicist, who also wrote novel...

Perhaps the most significant and enduring problem in postcolonial criticism is that the use of the term ‘postcolonial’ has an inevitably distorting effect. This is in one sense inevitable in that the postcolonial world itself is distorted; not, of course, in the sense of having been twisted away from some recognizable master-trajectory or severed f...