Nuclear Gothic

Nuclear Gothic Synopsis

There has been a cohesive cultural response from Japan to the atomic bomb and its radiological consequences: cultural icon Godzilla, awakened by radiation, has been imagined repeatedly as a manifestation of the monstrous power of nuclear weapons and their after-effects. Though studies by Joseph Siracusa, Paul Brians, Joyce A. Evans and David Dowling address various representations of atomic power in literature and film, critical engagement regarding nuclear cultures has still primarily been political, ecological or scientific in focus, with limited work available on fictional and imagined nuclear texts and narratives. By reading Western, and particularly American, conceptualisations of atomic power (whether actual or imagined) as gothic, and by situating them in relation to their Japanese counterparts, Nuclear Gothic aims to rectify this critical dispersion and cultural gap; it also seeks to provide an interdisciplinary study of nuclear narratives as viewed through a specific critical lens, surveying atomic processes, nuclear fictions and specific historical and cultural moments as instances and products of the gothic mode.