History of the Gothic: Twentieth-Century Gothic

"The great strength of this excellent book is that it is not a straightforward tour through the canonical works of the twentieth-century Gothic. It is much more interesting than that. Armitt takes the reader on a devious, elliptical, fascinating journey through a range of strange texts, some well-known and others unjustifiably less so, combining critical inventiveness and precision with a constant undertow of reference to major cultural and social preoccupations--child abuse, trauma, aftermaths of war, sexual uncertainty and transgression--which both illumine the texts and are in turn illumined, through a specifically distorted Gothic lens, by them."--David Punter, University of Bristol