Australian Gothic
A Cinema of Horrors
Author(s) Jonathan Rayner
Language: English
Genre(s): Media, Film and Theatre
Series: Gothic Literary Studies
- June 2022 · 256 pages ·216x138mm
- · Hardback - 9781786838896
- · eBook - pdf - 9781786838902
- · eBook - epub - 9781786838919
About The Book
The term ‘Gothic’ has been applied to examples of Australian cinema since the 1970s, often in arbitrary and divergent ways. This book examines a wide range of Australian films to trace their Gothic resemblances, characteristics and meanings. By concentrating on the occurrence of Gothic motifs, characters, landscapes and narratives, it argues for the recognition and relevance of a coherent Gothic heritage in Australian film. A plethora of Gothic representatives are considered in relation to four consistent and illuminating continuities (images of the family, ideas of monstrosity, generic hybridity and the occurrence of the sublime), and this study debates the appearance and asserts the significance of Australian Gothic films within their national, cultural, literary and cinematic traditions.
Endorsements
‘The Australian Gothic is a critical reading protocol and Jonathan Rayner has led this field in identifying gothic elements across a diverse range of film genres. This book is his most detailed and comprehensive work that locates and defines horror in Australian Gothic.’
Mark David Ryan, Associate Professor in Film and Screen at Queensland University of Technology, Australia
‘Jonathan Rayner is already indelibly the most sustained, probing and erudite explorer of Gothic in Australian cinema. In this very welcome book, he goes further in showing Australian cinema since the New Wave to be shot through with the Gothic forces of the uncanny, the fantastic and the sublime.’
Allison Craven, Associate Professor of Screen Studies and English at James Cook University, Australia
Contents
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
INTRODUCTION
FAMILIARITY
MONSTROSITY
HYBRIDITY
SUBLIMITY
CONCLUSION
FILMOGRAPHY
BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDEX