Description: Drawing on a rich array of texts from a long history of the gothic, this book contends that the doom faced by the world in popular culture is related to the current global instability, renegotiation of worldwide power and the American bid for hegemony. Revealing the ways in which images of destruction and social upheaval both query the violence with which the US has asserted itself locally and globally, and feed the longing for stable imperial structures, this book will be of interest to scholars and students of popular culture, cultural and media studies, literary and visual studies and sociology.
Review Quotes: 'Ranging from the Cold War to the recent War on Terror, Dr Johan Höglund's precise, ambitious and thought-provoking study marks the return of (contemporary) politics to where it has always lurked, darkly - in the very heart of Gothic literature.' Tabish Khair, Aarhus University, Denmark 'Original, timely, and solidly researched, The American Imperial Gothic challenges orthodoxies about American culture and casts the American Gothic in a new and darker light, revealing the complex collusion between the entertainment industry and America's history of militarism in the long twentieth century. Höglund's book offers an important contribution to American Studies and Gothic Studies alike!' Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet, University of Lausanne, Switzerland '... the utility and timeliness of the concept of the American imperial gothic outlined in this book makes it an important contribution to the field of American cultural studies and it will surely be widely cited in the literature, and deservedly find its way onto undergraduate reading lists across a range of disciplines.' Stephen Connor, Viewfinder Online 'While American Imperial Gothic is a fairly easy and quick read, it successfully takes on the complicated workings-across a nation's lifetime, no less-of the web of politics, history, popular culture, and power in the United States.' Science Fiction studies 'Johan Höglund's latest volume narrows its focus from the world to America in eleven enlightening chapters. As with his former co-edited title, again libraries should buy this latest, but so should readers interested in dark-souled films and search-and-destroy computer games. ... For cineastes, the pleasure is in reading the abundance of films Hoglund raises for their telling details, for their showing of a monstrous version of draining imperialism.' Gothic Imagination 'As a historically-grounded and theoretically-informed exploration of popular cultural texts that engages with debates in P