Nordic Gothic traces Gothic fiction in the Nordic region from its
beginnings in the nineteenth century with a main focus on the
development of Gothic from the 1990s onwards in literature, film, TV
series, and new media. The volume gives an overview of Nordic Gothic
fiction in relation to transnational developments and provides a number
of case studies and in-depth analyses of individual narratives.
Nordic Gothic creates an understanding of a ubiquitous but hitherto
under-researched cultural phenomenon by showing how the Gothic
narratives make visible cultural anxieties haunting the Nordic countries
and their welfare systems, and how central these anxieties are for the
understanding of identities and ideologies in the Nordic region. It
examines how figures from Nordic folklore and mythology function as
metaphorical expressions of Gothic themes, and also how universal Gothic
figures such as vampires and witches are used in the Nordic context. The
Nordic settings, and especially the Nordic wilderness, are explored from
perspectives such as ecocriticism and postcolonialism and subcategories
such as Gothic crime, Gothic humour, troll Gothic and geriatric Gothic
are defined and discussed. Furthermore, the phenomenon of transcultural
adaptation is investigated, using the cases of Lars von Trier's Riget
and John Ajvide Lindqvist's Låt den rätte komma in, two seminal works
of contemporary Nordic Gothic.
