“Book Descriptions: Beginning with the eruption of Vesuvius in 1631, an event so powerful it created a new landscape and inspired the desolate and savage paintings of Salvator Rosa, Richard Davenport-Hines traces the evolution of the gothic imagination. With their precipices, ruined castles, dark caves, and contorted trees, Rosa’s paintings provided the original visual framework of the genre. But why has a sensibility that emerged in reaction to the Enlightenment, that sought to negate its ideals of rationality and perfectibility with a celebration of inversion, terror, and the sublime, continued to obsess us? In fact, why does the gothic appear to be thriving – more popular, in some ways, than ever? Taking us inside and beyond the haunted houses that typically come to mind, Davenport-Hines’s revelator history shows us the larger cultural implications of gothic’s transgressive impulses. He ranges widely through art, architecture, literature, gardening, photography, filmmaking, music, and clothing design, and examines figures as various as Byron, Horace Walpole, Goya, Frankenstein’s monster, Edgar Allan Poe, Jackson Pollock, David Lynch, and The Cure. Whatever the medium, Gothic probes our ongoing fascination with “twisted and punished desires, barbarity, caprice, base terrors, and vicious life.”” DRIVE
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