Gothic television

Helen Wheatley

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780719071492, 9780719071485
• eBook ISBN: 9781526125613
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Television History & Criticism

Gothic television is the first full length study of the Gothic released on British and US television. An historical account, the book combines detailed archival research with analyses of key programmes, from Mystery and Imagination and Dark Shadows, to The Woman in White and Twin Peaks, and uncovers an aspect of television drama history which has, until now, remained critically unexplored. While some have seen television as too literal or homely a medium to successfully present Gothic fictions, Gothic television argues that the genre, in its many guises, is, and has always been, well-suited to television as a domestic medium, given the genre's obsessions with haunted houses and troubled families.

This book will be of interest to lecturers and students across a number of disciplines including television studies, Gothic studies, and adaptation studies, as well as to the general reader with an interest in the Gothic, and in the history of television drama.

Table of contents

• Front matter
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Gothic television – texts and contexts
• Showing less, suggesting more: the ghost story on British television
• Blood, guts and special effects: the heritage of horror on British television
• The female Gothic: women, domesticity and the Gothic adaptation
• Keeping it in the family: American Gothic television in the 1960s
• Televisuality and the new American Gothic
• Conclusion
• Teleography
• Filmography
• Bibliography
• Index