What with Dacre Stoker’s Dracula: the Undead and now Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Love Never Dies, there seems to be something of a recent vogue for sequels to Goth classics. The basic problem is that The Phantom of the Opera requires no sequel. This is equally true of both Gaston Leroux’s 1910 novel, which sees the aged Erik die of a grief-induced heart attack, and Lloyd Webber’s musical, first opened in 1986, in which he appears to vanish into thin air. How on earth to follow that? With difficulty, if Lloyd We

Arlene Russo

Thursday 20 May 2010 19:30

On-line Journal

BBC Radio 4 at 2300 GMT on Tuesday 30 March

Gothic draws attention to the monstrous, the horrific, that which exceeds the limits imposed by moral taboos, the so-called laws of nature, as well as cultural inhibitions. The Gothic subject is typically one in a state of excess – excessive desire, excessive fear, excessive weakness; challenging the boundaries of normative acceptability,  Gothic self-consciously interrogates definitions of humanity. Frankenstein and his creature, Jekyll/Hyde, Dracula, Dorian Gray all point to hybrid models of humanity, all coexisting in the multiple simultaneity of a split ego. What is human? The Ox

BBC Radio 4

.... and a little bit of Johnny Cash to finish

There is nothing new in the reproduction of Gothic motifs and certainly nothing new in the exploitation of death for business. What I am interested in, however, is to consider the deeper impact of consumerism, with its focus on desire, on the consuming self in relation to the cultural commodification of Gothic motifs. Gothic is excess and we live, apparently, in excess times: excessive eating, excessive dieting, excessive fandom, excessive hatred. In an article reviewing the ‘Return to the Baroque’ exhibition currently hosted in Naples, Rachel Spence briefly discussed the significance of D