Ramsey Campbell

Keith M. C. O'Sullivan

• Publisher: University of Wales Press
• Year: 2023
• Print ISBN: 9781786839855
• eBook ISBN: 9781786839879
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This book pays overdue attention to the British writer Ramsey Campbell, a key figure in the post-1970s boom in Anglo-American horror fiction. Despite a huge output and receiving every accolade within his field over a long career, Campbell has not yet been accorded anything like the wider critical recognition given to his contemporary Stephen King. This study concentrates also on Campbell's neglected novels and novellas, rather than the short stories for which he has been better known. The book Ramsey Campbell establishes the author's unique prose style, denoted by a haunted self-consciousness about the act of writing and role of readership, and his distinctive mediation of the Gothic tradition: religiously agnostic, politically liberal and ethically humane. For the first time, Campbell's works are interpreted in the contexts of trends in postmodernist and posthumanist thought and compared explicitly to King's, and his contribution to both Gothic studies and wider contemporary literature is appraised.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: A Neglected ‘Poet’: Campbell and Gothic Tradition
• 1 Impractical Magic: Campbell’s Agnostic Gothic
• 2 Of Bonds and Beings: Campbell’s Gothic Sociopaths
• 3 Writing with Intensity: Campbell’s Gothic Novellas
• 4 ‘Ghosts’ from the Machine: Campbell’s Gothic Techno-Fictions
• Conclusion: ‘Something to Believe in’: Repositioning Campbell in the Gothic – and Beyond
• Notes
• Select Bibliography