Fashioning Gothic Bodies

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Fashioning Gothic Bodies by Catherine Spooner (Manchester:Manchester University Press, 2004), ISBN: 7190 6400 7, 224pp., £47.50 hb; 0 7190 6401 5, 224pp., £15.99 pb.

Catherine Spooner's Fashioning Gothic Bodies is an ambitious and interesting project; above all, it is the kind you are glad someone else has done, since it requires detailed knowledge of two fields not previously studied in conjunction, Gothic literature and changes in fashion. Spooner attributes the fact that her approach is so novel to the critical prevalence of a surface-depth model in which the surface of the Gothic is largely ignored because we believe that what it is really about is what lies beneath.Wisely …