Some of the books I'm aware of covering the field of Goth and Gothic culture.
For my money this is still the best account of what Gothic is about. Davenport-Hines is a very entertaining writer and I was astonished at the amount he'd managed to uncover and describe in such amusing detail. Pretty good in its pictures and visuals, as well, which helps it score over similar books. I have some quibbles with D-H's basic argument about the history of the Gothic sensibility, and I think there could have been a little less about 18th-century landscape gardening, but excellent despite that.
Fairly weighty and academic, this - a collection of essays by experts in the 'Gothic Studies' field covering not just literature, thankfully, but para-narrative genres such as film. It's a good introduction, if you can plough through it, to the academic study of Gothic and all it entails, but it's still fairly closely tied down to literature, really. No pictures!
This is very deliberately intended to fill in the gaps in Davenport-Hines's book, which are largely the popular culture side of Gothic, so here you get more pulp comics, modern fiction, and deathrock bands than 18th-century heroines in dark castles: a catalogue of the sensational and sometimes extreme (but then, wasn't The Monk both?). Intelligently written, as Mr Baddeley is a bright cove, but I think it skates rather across the surface of the Gothic phenomenon, albeit making impressive patterns in the ice.
This is Paul Hodkinson's sociology doctoral thesis, and full points to Berg for publishing it. Looks very nice indeed. Of course it suffers for being precisely a sociology doctoral thesis - that is, it spends a long time telling you what you may already know. But good for recording the ins and outs of Goth culture in a way the chaps of the International Gothic Association might actually find intellectually respectable.
Another doctoral thesis, but we applaud Catherine even more for managing to produce something which synthesises literary and visual influences on the Gothic - rather like the quite groundbreaking interdisciplinary work she did at Luton and Goldsmiths College. The big drawback of this account of deathliness in dress is that for a fashion history there AREN'T ENOUGH PICTURES! But that's a cost consideration, I imagine.
More academic Gothic Studies, but I think intended more for the Eng. Lit. undergraduate who's about to do a term's worth of Gothic as their special subject, so not as heavy as A Companion to the Gothic ...A short encyclopedia of Gothic writers, and very useful from that point of view.
A very funny sketch of Goth culture from someone involved in it, this time replete with pictures and a gently scathing commentary on Goths and all their subcategories and little quirks. Good-looking, but short, and you won't find a new copy for much less than twelve quid. Voltaire's also written Paint It Black, an equally amusing guide to Gothic living.
A guide to the whole of Gothicness including gardening, drink and visiting cemeteries as well as art and books. I really applaud this book, although there are a few little errors here and there. Nancy's taken the time actually to speak to about a hundred participants in Goth culture (including the superannuated) and include their views and ideas. She has a wonderfully broad and compassionate approach to the whole thing. Very well done indeed, we think!
Carol Siegel has made a great and commendable effort to bring together comment about film, literature, and modern society with the Goth boys and girls she obviously feels a great affinity for, and the book is nowhere near as grimly incomprehensible as I feared - but it does bear the heavy marks of its Stateside context, in that for Siegel Goths are first and foremost sexual radicals challenging conservative morals. Not what I find at all.
At last! A book on Gothic, by an academic, which doesn't try to claim that it's 'about' any one thing in particular, and acknowledges its multifarious and contradictory aspects; which isn't disfigured by acco-speak; and which is excitingly transdisciplinary. Just what we expected from Catherine. Of course it can't cover everything, but what a delightful set of insights into the performativity and presentations of Goths and modern Gothic. See my longer review on Amazon for more effusive praise.
This book hung around on my shelves for well over a year after I bought it at the Tate's Gothic Nightmares exhibition - dutifully, really, because I wasn't looking forward to a collection of dry or barely-readable 18th-century texts. In fact, it's great fun, and traces the development of the Georgian Gothic sensibility from pre-existing materials to its full expression in literature and art. There's a longer review on Amazon.
More in the same vein as Catherine's books, and if anything even more exciting because drawing on the expertise of a range of contributors it casts its net more widely (actually Catherine, Carol Siegel & Paul Hodkinson all have essays in this book). This approaches the Goth phenomenon sensitively and with insight, as one might hope when several of the contributors are Goths or former Goths. The essay by the gentleman who spent a while as a Gothically-glossed exotic dancer in an LA gay club has to be read to be believed. A provocative collision of the personal and the analytic. I've got a longer review on Amazon: click here.
Goths are a humourless, self-involved lot, aren't they? Well, we know this isn't the case, but they do sometimes like to think of themselves as ultra-tolerant, self-expressive, genderless social subversives. Dunja Brill's book, written from the inside, suggests this may not be quite as true as first appears, and instead marshals an impressive case that Goth culture is subtly (and in some cases not so subtly) gendered, and is more a way of negotiating with mainstream values rather than subverting them entirely. . Engaging, humane stuff.
And then there's this, which comes with the highest possible recommendation. Find out more on the Sales page.
