Gothic

In this book, Richard Davenport-Hines traces the history of the gothic sensibility, from the seventeenth century to the present day. The birth of gothic can be said to date to the eruption of Vesuvius in 1631, an event so powerful it created a new landscape and inspired the desolate and savage scenes depicted by the painter Salvator Rosa. With their precipices, ruined castles, dark caves, and contorted trees, they provided the original visual and imaginative frame of the genre. Whatever the medium - art, architecture, gardening, literature, photography, filmmaking, music, clothing design - gothic is about exaggeration, about immoderation. This revelatory history ranges across genres and eras, taking in figures as various as Lord Byron, Francisco Goya, Edgar Allan Poe, Jackson Pollock, David Lynch, and The Cure as it probes ongoing fascination with "twisted and punished desires, barbarity, caprice, base terrors and vicious life."