Since it first emerged from Britain's punk-rock scene in the late 1970s, goth subculture has haunted postmodern culture and society, reinventing itself inside and against the mainstream. Goth: Undead Subculture is the first collection of scholarly essays devoted to this enduring yet little examined cultural phenomenon. Twenty-three essays from various disciplines explore the music, cinema, television, fashion, literature, aesthetics, and fandoms associated with the subculture. They examine goth's many dimensions--including its melancholy, androgyny, spirituality, and perversity--and take readers inside locations in Los Angeles, Austin, Leeds, London, Buffalo, New York City, and Sydney. A number of the contributors are or have been participants in the subculture, and several draw on their own experiences.
The volume's editors provide a rich history of goth, describing its play of resistance and consumerism; its impact on class, race, and gender; and its distinctive features as an "undead" subculture in light of post-subculture studies and other critical approaches. The essays include an interview with the distinguished fashion historian Valerie Steele; analyses of novels by Anne Rice, Poppy Z. Brite, and Nick Cave; discussions of goths on the Internet; and readings of iconic goth texts from Bram Stoker's Dracula to James O'Barr's graphic novel The Crow. Other essays focus on gothic music, including seminal precursors such as Joy Division and David Bowie, and goth-influenced performers such as the Cure, Nine Inch Nails, and Marilyn Manson. Gothic sexuality is explored in multiple ways, the subjects ranging from the San Francisco queercore scene of the 1980s to the increasing influence of fetishism and fetish play. Together these essays demonstrate that while its participants are often middle-class suburbanites, goth blurs normalizing boundaries even as it appears as an everlasting shadow of late capitalism.
Contributors: Heather Arnet, Michael Bibby, Jessica Burstein, Angel M. Butts, Michael du Plessis, Jason Friedman, Nancy Gagnier, Ken Gelder, Lauren M. E. Goodlad, Joshua Gunn, Trevor Holmes, Paul Hodkinson, David Lenson, Robert Markley, Mark Nowak, Anna Powell, Kristen Schilt, Rebecca Schraffenberger, David Shumway, Carol Siegel, Catherine Spooner, Lauren Stasiak, Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock

Customer Reviews:

Avg. Customer Rating: 4.0 / 5.0

Not bad at all:

I must say, I wish this work would have been out a very long time ago when I first started 'in the Goth subculture'! It has a wealth of information and a hefty amount of pages, but well worth checking into.
Recommended.
Corvis Nocturnum ~ author of Embracing the Darkness; Understanding Dark Subcultures

Through The Glass Darkly:

A reviewer above wondered how self proclaimed Goths might take this book and some of the views on Goths it expounds. As an old schooler, I completely welcome it. I think resistance to a anyone taking a dead on 20/20 look at any subculture or scene (which as the book points out are not the same) is usually brought about by some older members out of a certain sense of defensiveness. Similar to the reaction parents might have of someone critical of their baby. There is now and always has been a certain elitist... more info

Good for history and trivia:

Goth: Undead Subculture is a voluminous collection of essays commenting on the subculture, mostly by academics, though there are a few essays written mainly from the point of view of self-identified goths. It made for interesting reading for someone who's high-school experience with goth can be summed up by the t-shirt slogan "I'd be goth but I can't afford to shop at Hot Topic." The discussions of "authenticity" are fun to read from that point of view. The academics seem to aspire to say something... more info

Gothic Scholarship Discovers Goth:

The best way of tackling a subject that sprawls across disparate academic disciplines is to engage the services of a collection of experts in the fields involved. Previous studies of Gothic have been either scattergun takes on the whole genre by generalists, or focused investigations of this or that topic, usually literature. Goth: Undead Subculture is the first to break the trend and, even more admirably, actually tries to do so from the viewpoint of the Goth-on-the-dancefloor.
Of course, what you end... more info

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