Patrick McGrath and his Worlds

Madness and the Transnational Gothic

Matt Foley, Rebecca Duncan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000763300
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria inglesa

Following the publication of Ghost Town (2005), a complex, globally conscious genealogy of millennial Manhattan, McGrath's transnational status as an English author resident in New York, his pointed manipulation of British and American contexts, and his clear apprehension of imperial legacies have all come into sharper focus. By bringing together readings cognizant of this transnational and historical sensitivity with those that build on existing studies of McGrath's engagements with the gothic and madness, Patrick McGrath and his Worlds sheds new light on an author whose imagined realities reflect the anxieties, pathologies, and power dynamics of our contemporary world order. McGrath's fiction has been noted as parodic (The Grotesque, 1989), psychologically disturbing (Spider, 1990), and darkly sexual (Asylum, 1996). Throughout, his corpus is characterized by a preoccupation with madness and its institutions and by a nuanced relationship to the gothic. With its international range of contributors, and including a new interview with McGrath himself, this book opens up hitherto underexplored theoretical perspectives on the key concerns of McGrath's ouevre, moving conversations around McGrath's work decisively forward. Offering the first sustained exploration of his fiction's transnational and world-historical dimensions, Patrick McGrath and his Worlds seeks to situate, reflect upon, and interrogate McGrath's role as a key voice in Anglophone letters in our millennial global moment.

Index

Note: Page numbers followed by “n” denote endnotes.

• 9/11 xi, 1, 11, 14, 119, 143, 146–148

• Adorno, Theodor 4
• affluenza 33, 38, 44, 45, 47
• Alexander, Jeffrey 146
• Alford, Fred: Trauma, Culture and PTSD 146
• Alzheimer’s 149
• American Dream 11, 38, 39
• American Psychiatric Association 119, 144–146, 150
• American Revolution 11, 32–33, 38, 39–41, 42, 45–46
• Anansi 22
• anti–Semitism 153, 155, 157–158, 160, 165n1
• Arundhati Roy: The Algebra of Infinite Justice, 146
• Asylum x, 2–4, 16, 73, 98–99, 103, 104–112, 114, 134n2

• Baker, Charley 78
• Baldick, Chris: The Oxford Book of Gothic Tales 104
• Banks, Iain: The Wasp Factory 74
• Berger, John 146
• Blackshirts,, 157, 163, 164
• Bloch, Robert: Psycho 74, 77
• Blood and Water and other Tales ix, 1, 112
  • “Ambro...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Foreword
• Introduction: McGrath in the World: Madness, Gothic, and Transnational Consciousness
• Section I Transnational McGrath
• Section II Theorizing McGrath
• Section III Millennial McGrath
• Afterword
• Appendix: A Patrick McGrath Bibliography: Thirty Years of Select Criticism (excluding short reviews) and Interviews, 1988–2018
• Notes on Contributors
• Index