Gothic Machine

Dr David J. Jones is a lecturer of Victorian, Modernist and Post-Colonial literatures on the Open University's B.A. and M.A. English Literature. He also taught Film Studies for fifteen years. He is also a member of the International Gothic Association and the Magic Lantern Society.

Gothic Machine is an interesting piece of scholarship precisely because it refuses that type of chronological and even sequential structure. Instead, it prefers to relish on the interconnections between different forms of media and how their languages may coalesce and expand our meaning and understanding of them. Aside from being a very thorough introduction to the role of visual technology and optical illusion up until the release of the first Frankenstein adaptation (J. Searle Dawley, 1910), Jones' book manages to achieve what only good academic volumes do: it creates an awareness of the pressing need to consider what had, until now, only been invoked as part of a niche area of study. Xavier Aldana Reyes, University of Lancaster This well-researched and well-written book makes a major contribution to the history of the magic lantern and its relationship to literature. Gothic Machine combines the author's first-hand familiarity with the magic lanterns and phantasmagoria and a deep knowledge of Gothic literature - It is impossible in a short summary to do justice to the richness of the scholarship in this book. The depth of scholarship - makes it a "must read" for anyone with serious interest in the history and culture of the magic lantern in relation to literature. Professor Kentwood D. Wells, Connecticut University Editor, The Magic Lantern Gazette. Nobel Prize-winning writer, Seamus Heaney has called Dr. Jones's criticism 'wonderfully sensitive and accurate'.