Gothic Machine: Textualities, Pre-cinematic Media and Film in Popular Visual Culture, 1670-1910 (Gothic Literary Studies) - Tapa dura

Gothic Machine is an interesting piece of scholarship precisely because it refuses that type of chronological and even sequential structure. Instead, it prefers to relish on the interconnections between different forms of media and how their languages may coalesce and expand our meaning and understanding of them. Aside from being a very thorough introduction to the role of visual technology and optical illusion up until the release of the first Frankenstein adaptation (J. Searle Dawley, 1910), Jones' book manages to achieve what only good academic volumes do: it creates an awareness of the pressing need to consider what had, until now, only been invoked as part of a niche area of study. Xavier Aldana Reyes, University of Lancaster This well-researched and well-written book makes a major contribution to the history of the magic lantern and its relationship to literature. Gothic Machine combines the author's first-hand familiarity with the magic lanterns and phantasmagoria and a deep knowledge of Gothic literature - It is impossible in a short summary to do justice to the richness of the scholarship in this book. The depth of scholarship - makes it a "must read" for anyone with serious interest in the history and culture of the magic lantern in relation to literature. Professor Kentwood D. Wells, Connecticut University Editor, The Magic Lantern Gazette. Nobel Prize-winning writer, Seamus Heaney has called Dr. Jones's criticism 'wonderfully sensitive and accurate'.

This book reveals some of the exciting inter-relations between Gothic Horror literature, film and magic lantern shows. It is an innovative work, providing new insights into how Gothic Horror as a whole started, with the genesis of the Frankenstein films, and encourages the reader to think of the relations between such books and films as one vibrant set of energies. It examines the connection between Gothic and film studies and the media. Jones provides a useful referencing tool for academic departments and explores the advent of film in the 1890's and its relation to French Symbolist literature, and the Lumieres Brothers, as well as the link between Schiller, de Sade and Robertson's Fantasmagorie.