Dark Museum

Literary Nonfiction. Poetry. Translated from the Spanish by Michelle Gil- Montero. In this book of lyric critical essays, Argentinian poet and critic María Negroni writes about Gothic works--ranging from Horace Walpole's classic novel The Castle of Otranto to Julia Kristeva's Black Sun to James Cameron's film Aliens--and develops an accumulative, absorbing, transnational theory of politics and aesthetics. In the introduction she writes: I want to share something of that fascinating imaginary, packed with castles and lakes, crypts and laboratories, music boxes and evil gardens, urban ruins and boats like coffins ferrying magnificent dreams. Because in that atmosphere, it is my impression, something crucial materializes: a purely sentimental domain where it is suddenly possible to perceive, under any light, the critical link between childhood and atrocity, art and crime, passion and fear, and the desire for fusion and writing.