Gothic: Four Hundred Years of Excess, Horror, Evil and Ruin

New York: North Point Press; Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999. Cloth, 438 pages, illustrations (some colour); 25 cm. Firm binding, edges lightly soiled. Stray pen mark/one leaf, otherwise unmarked. Dust jacket with moderate shelfwear. Gothic revival in art. "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."' - Publisher. CONTENTS: 1. The spectre still will haunt us; 2. Stark mad with gardens; 3. The strength of backward-looking thoughts; 4. They are come to tear me to pieces; 5. The dead have exhausted their power of deceiving; 6. A race of devils; 7. Wild passion for wounding; 8. This man belongs to me I want him; 9. Family evil; 10. We'd rather have the iceberg than the ship; 11. Wild mood swings.. 1st. Hardcover. Very Good/Very Good. 8vo.