Product Description

An assessment of American culture on the eve of the millennium. Once terrified by Anne Rice or Stephen King, watching "Halloween" or following the O.J. Simpson trial, we can rely on the comfort of our inner child, an angel, or even a crystal. In this book the author asks why people are determined to be haunted, courting the Gothic at every turn, yet at the same time, committed to escape through any new scheme for ready-made transcendence. The book depicts a culture suffused with the Gothic, not just in novels and films, but even in the nonfictive realms of politics and academic theories, TV news and talk shows, various therapies and discourses on AIDS and the environment. Gothic's first wave, in the 1790s, reflected the terrifying events unfolding in the French Revolution. Here the author asks what does the ascendancy of the Gothic in the 1990s tell us about our own day? The author also explores another, seemingly unrelated trend, the widespread belief that recreating oneself is as easy as making a wish. Looking at the world of Forrest Gump, the author aims to show how this parallel culture actually works reciprocally with the Gothic. Finally, using the work of Nietzsche and Shelley, and the recent creations of Toni Morrison and Tony Kushner, he aims to show how the Gothic and the visionary can come together in persuasive and renovating ways.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #894114 in Books
• Published on: 1999-10-08
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 208 pages

Review
What do Richard Nixon, Freddy Krueger, O.J. Simpson, and Edgar Allan Poe have in common with one another - but not with Percy Bysshe Shelley and Ralph Waldo Emerson? Answer: The former express our nation's cult of gothic guilt and fear; the latter are potential models of redemption. Edmundson (English/Univ. of Virginia) argues that the gothic mindset, exemplified in lurid classics of the late 18th century (e.g., Walpole's The Castle of Otranto and Lewis's The Monk) dominates contemporary American culture. From these works he distills categories that he finds ubiquitous in modern pop culture, including protagonists equally divided between good and wicked selves, scenarios in which dungeons or other underground scenes of sadomasochistic horror figure prominently, the hidden past that refuses to die (in recovered-memory syndrome), and so forth. Racism is, above all else, the part of the American past that refuses to die, haunting us in fiction (Toni Morrison's Beloved), in the news (O.J.), and in cinema. Edmundson has written an entertaining and thoughtful book, but his overly elastic thesis occasionally gets the better of his good judgment. He is prone to write outlandish things, making his book at times a lurid bit of American gothic itself. His arguments often fall into the categories he criticizes: Poe, for example, is Emerson's evil twin in the American tradition (his America seems divided between angels and incubi). Though he justifiably scorns the recent angel craze as an expression of phony transcendence, he also presents Shelley, Emerson, Whitman, and even Nietzsche as angels of a sort (he calls them "visionaries") who might deliver us from our abject need. One might say that this book's thesis belongs in the American tradition of cultural pessimism, the very malady for which it purports to be the cure. Even though Edmundson's main thesis is overdrawn, his book is rewarding. It has many startling insights, shrewd observations, and considerable narrative momentum. (Kirkus Reviews)

Customer Reviews

An ambitious work of cultural analysis ...
In his deceptively concise work on "angels, sadomasochism, and the culture of the gothic," Nightmare on Main Street (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1997), Mark Edmunson argues that, pace the late, great Carl Sagan, we do indeed live in a "demon-haunted world," albeit one haunted perhaps by demons of our own making. Edmundson's seductively convincing claim is that, two centuries down the line from the genre's origins, we have come to narrate our world through the conventions of gothic fiction. Not only our literature (horror, but also such works as Nobel laureate Tony Morrison's Beloved), our cinema (the slasher film, legitimated by the Academy Award given The Silence of the Lambs), but even our news is generically gothic (l'affaire O.J. Simpson). We--individually, socially, culturally--are haunted by psychology, ideology (cf. Terry Castle's "Phantasmagoria" in The Female Thermometer (NY: Oxford UP, 1995), as well as her claims for Ann Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho as a source of modern subjectivity, e.g., her introduction to the recent Oxford World Classics edition), and our resurgent gothicism is as much an epiphenomenon of millenial anxiety as its emergence was of the Terror of the French Revolution. Interestingly, however, Edmundson's own narrative takes typically gothic twist, doubling this evil twin with the "facile transcendence," as he quite rightly names it, of new age spiritualism, exemplified by the recent mania for angels and such middlebrow feelgood productions as Forrest Gump. While such tail-biting is somewhat problematic, Nightmare on Main Street is nonetheless an ambitious, suggestive, and, provisionally, convincing work of cultural analysis. Related works of interest include Harold Bloom's Omens of Millenium: The Gnosis of Angels, Dreams, and Resurrection (NY: Riverhead, 1996); Teresa Goddu's Gothic America: Narrative, History, and Nation (NY: Columbia UP, 1997); and the collection of essays/exhibition catalog, Gothic: Transmutations of Horror in Late Twentieth-Century Art, edited by Christoph Grunenberg (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998).

Very aggravating book
This is a book I would recommend to be left on the shelf. Edmundson sees a society hurtling toward overt sadomasochism ans completely obsessed with the Gothic. His view is very narrow, and poorly supported. His opinion that Scar, from Disney's The Lion King, was a gay child molestor who killed Mufasa because of Simba's Oedipus complex is evidence that he does not truly know what he is talking about. If you are interested in a book full of pessimistic ideas and obscure references, by all means read this. If you would prefer a more complete explanation of a valid idea, try something else.