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

“Goth: Undead Subculture is a very engaging read—a nice mélange of ethnographic anecdote, cultural criticism, and historical analysis—in which a multidisciplinary crew of contributors analyzes an important and complex subculture through its fashions, music, dancing, literature, sexual practices, aesthetic ideals, theatrical displays, historical precedents, and ideologies.”—Robert Walser, author of Running with the Devil: Power, Gender, and Madness in Heavy Metal Music

“Goth creates its distinctive way of life by appropriating materials from a vast array of cultural phenomena—post-punk music, gothic literary tradition, pre-Christian mythology, sexual nonconformity, aesthetic avant-gardes—all of which it adopts primarily as style. Goth style is thus both dizzyingly heterogeneous and instantly recognizable. It is hard to imagine a single book that could do this subculture justice; yet by assembling contributors from a range of disciplines and judiciously including many voices of subcultural participants themselves, Goth: Undead Subculture manages to depict, while also reflecting critically on, this subculture’s enduring appeal. This collection will be the definitive work on its topic.”—Tim Dean, author of Beyond Sexuality

Lauren M. E. Goodlad is Associate Professor of English and a member of the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She is the author of Victorian Literature and the Victorian State: Character and Governance in a Liberal Society. Michael Bibby is Professor of English at Shippensburg University. He is the author of Hearts and Minds: Bodies, Poetry, and Resistance in the Vietnam Era and the editor of The Vietnam War and Postmodernity.

“Goth: Undead Subculture provides an exceptional read on the Goth subculture, which itself proves a unique subject for any subcultural study. This book is for those who want to delve into the dark waters of the Goth subculture or for anyone who just wants to learn a little more about the origins and orientations of an often misunderstood and misrepresented subculture.”

Maryanne Mangano, M/C Reviews

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“Goth: Undead Subculture is an incisive book on the subject. The editors have struck a perfect balance that both engages and entertains, and that’s no small feat. The very idea of trying to encompass everything from musical tastes, to the spiritual practices of Goth without exhausting potential readers is what makes this book a great read. Not only will it grace the shelves of many Goths’ private collections, but stands to become a definitive text. Naturally, it’s beautifully designed and would be a handsome complement to any coffee table and is sure to spark lively conversations at house parties, cafés, clubs and classes alike! Five out of five coffins!”

Kit McAllister, Morbid Outlook

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“Goth:Undead Subculture, Lauren M. E. Goodlad and Michael Bibby's collection of scholarly essays (the first such book devoted solely to the scrutiny of all things goth, the editors claim), succeeds when its contributors take clearly delineated topics and time frames (Tim Burton's nostalgia for 1950s and '60s monster movies, or Buffalo's nightclub scene from 1982 to 1984) as their objects of inquiry. The pièce de résistance in this mode is Bibby's stunningly precise reading of Joy Division's history.”

Andrea Walker, Bookforum

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“Dust off those whips and chains! Editors Goodlad and Bibby manage to take a marginalized area of popular culture and turn it into something everyone can and will relate to. Using international experts from the academy, as well as the ‘real world,’ Goth: Undead Subculture speaks to a broad, though educated, audience. From masochistic fashion to Buffy the Vampire Slayer, this powerful text illuminates the historical and theoretical impact of the Gothic subculture, taking readers on a ride through Tim Burton films, Poppy Z. Brite novels and everything in between. No stone is left unturned as the text offers a multitude of visual examples throughout, my favorite being a CD cover of Gen from the Genitorturers clad in leather biker-gear while piercing her tongue with some kind of skewer. Ouch.”

Rebecca Housel, Journal of Popular Culture

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“Here are 22 essays that will appeal to the pop-culture critic, academic or general reader who’s always been curious about those mysterious, often mushroom pale individuals who wear head-to-toe black in the summer time. . . . [A] reader who picks and chooses at this book’s dark buffet . . . will find much to enjoy.”

Theresa Starkey, Paste

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“Like most of the subcultures to which people make allegiance in youth, but maintain to some degree in adulthood, Goth is a confluence off hobbyism and a passionate sense of the constructed self. This is well understood by those pieces in this intelligent collection of writings that are primarily documentary accounts of the authors’ involvement in, and self-identification with, Goth, or those which celebrate the fashion, the music, and the books.”

Roz Kaveny, Times Literary Supplement

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“The book’s strength lies in both its multiplicity of voices and rich modes of analysis . . . This book helps to strategically place goth within a nexus of music, fashion, literary, and related subcultural phenomena. An extensive bibliography facilitates further research. Recommended.”

G. R. Innes, Choice

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“The essays in this collection discuss all the traditional areas of cultural studies—performance, community, self-representation, gender relations—but also consider some of goth’s more oblique elements, such as literary styles, song lyrics, nostalgia, fetishism, and its connections with religion and apostasy. . . . [R]efreshingly free of the kind of heavy theoretical jargon that would make even the palest goth blanch in dismay.”

Mikita Brottman, The Chronicle Review

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“This academic-minded book is best suited to cultural studies aficionados and Goths themselves, but may be useful to anyone seeking to understand the ideologies and lifestyles of the black-eyeliner set. It exhumes the roots of goth in punk rock, vampire lore, Renaissance fashions, and other sources; probes identity and community; and traces goth’s arc in pop culture, from David Bowie and Siouxie Sioux to Edward Scissorhands and Buffy the Vampire Slayer.”

Keith Goetzman, Utne Reader

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“This collection of essays, focusing heavily on goth and gender, demonstrates the complexity of an often misunderstood subculture.”

Jenna Humphrey, Curve

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“[A]s the first anthology of its kind, it offers a timely and welcome contribution to scholarship in this field.”

Michelle Phillipov, Media International Australia

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