Patrick McGrath and his Worlds: Madness and the Transnational Gothic (Routledge Studies in Contemporary Literature)

Following the publication of __Ghost Town__ (2005), a complex, globally conscious genealogy of millennial Manhattan, McGrath’s transnational status as an English author resident in New York, his pointed manipulation of British and American contexts, and his clear apprehension of imperial legacies have all come into sharper focus. By bringing together readings cognizant of this transnational and historical sensitivity with those that build on existing studies of McGrath’s engagements with the gothic and madness, __Patrick McGrath and his Worlds__ sheds new light on an author whose imagined realities reflect the anxieties, pathologies, and power dynamics of our contemporary world order. McGrath’s fiction has been noted as parodic (__The Grotesque__, 1989), psychologically disturbing (__Spider__, 1990), and darkly sexual (__Asylum__, 1996). Throughout, his corpus is characterized by a preoccupation with madness and its institutions and by a nuanced relationship to the gothic. With its international range of contributors, and including a new interview with McGrath himself, this book opens up hitherto underexplored theoretical perspectives on the key concerns of McGrath’s ouevre, moving conversations around McGrath’s work decisively forward. Offering the first sustained exploration of his fiction’s transnational and world-historical dimensions, __Patrick McGrath and his Worlds__ seeks to situate, reflect upon, and interrogate McGrath’s role as a key voice in Anglophone letters in our millennial global moment. Cover Half Title Series Page Title Page Copyright Page Contents Acknowledgments Foreword Introduction: McGrath in the World: Madness, Gothic, and Transnational Consciousness SECTION I: Transnational McGrath 1 Writing and Reading the Spider: McGrath’s Web 2 Martha Peake and the Madness of “Free Trade” 3 “A cell without a nucleus is a ruin”: Vampiric Creations of the Unhealthy Disabled in Patrick McGrath’s “Blood Disease” 4 Revisiting the Spanish Civil War: An Interview with Patrick McGrath SECTION II: Theorizing McGrath 5 Madness, Tragedy, and the Implied Reader of Patrick McGrath’s Spider 6 The Terrors of the Self: The Manipulation of Identity Mythologies in Patrick McGrath’s Novels 7 Patrick McGrath and Passion: The Gothic Modernism of Asylum and Beyond SECTION III: Millennial McGrath 8 The Price of Suffering and the Value of Remembering: Patrick McGrath’s Trauma 9 “You have to be a warrior to live here”: PTSD as a Collective Sociopolitical Condition in Patrick McGrath’s Writing 10 The Liar, the Bitch, and the Wardrobe: Resisting Political Terror, Anti-Semitism, and Revenants in Patrick McGrath’s The Wardrobe Mistress Afterword Appendix: A Patrick McGrath Bibliography: Thirty Years of Select Criticism (excluding short reviews) and Interviews, 1988–2018 Notes on Contributors Index This collection opens up new theoretical perspectives on McGrath's corpus, moving conversations around his work decisively forward and seeking to situate McGrath as a key voice in Anglophone letters in our millennial global moment.