Ghost storeys: Ralph Adams Cram, modern Gothic media, and deconstructive microhistory at a Canadian church
"Do modern Gothic buildings and books have more in common than the "Gothic" adjective? Scholars have limited this question to British author/architects of the eighteenth century. However, Ralph Adams Cram (1863--1942) was America's most prolific and vocal advocate of Gothic Reviv...
| Summary: | "Do modern Gothic buildings and books have more in common than the "Gothic" adjective? Scholars have limited this question to British author/architects of the eighteenth century. However, Ralph Adams Cram (1863--1942) was America's most prolific and vocal advocate of Gothic Revival architecture, and he published a book of Gothic ghost stories in 1895. Ghost Storeys consequently offers the first comprehensive study of Cram's interdisciplinary Gothic aesthetics, deconstructing the boundaries of architecture and literature. For Cram, ghosts are manifestations of social sickness, and the unusual commission of a Canadian church allowed him to exercise his pessimistic revival of Gothic architecture in an ailing modern world. The lead patron, Edward Walker of eponymous Walkerville, Ontario, commissioned the church for his company town because he was secretly dying of syphilis, and Cram put Walker's regeneration in the hands of a Grail knight who might never come. Walkerville's Anglican architecture is haunted by a future that Cram himself could not provide, and through the intricate intersections of Gothic aesthetics, architectural ethics, and company town construction in Edwardian Canada, Cameron Macdonell opens new perspectives on the modern failure to resurrect the past. What came back from the Gothic grave was a tormented revenant in need of miraculous intervention. Painstakingly researched and illustrated, Ghost Storeys is a microhistory that redefines the allegorical relationship between a marginalized Canadian church and the Gothic Revival as a global interdisciplinary phenomenon."-- "Do modern Gothic buildings and books have more in common than the "Gothic" adjective? Scholars have limited this question to British author/architects of the eighteenth century. However, Ralph Adams Cram (1863--1942) was America's most prolific and vocal advocate of Gothic Revival architecture, and he published a book of Gothic ghost stories in 1895. Ghost Storeys consequently offers the first comprehensive study of Cram's interdisciplinary Gothic aesthetics, deconstructing the boundaries of architecture and literature. For Cram, ghosts are manifestations of social sickness, and the unusual commission of a Canadian church allowed him to exercise his pessimistic revival of Gothic architecture in an ailing modern world. The lead patron, Edward Walker of eponymous Walkerville, Ontario, commissioned the church for his company town because he was secretly dying of syphilis, and Cram put Walker's regeneration in the hands of a Grail knight who might never come. Walkerville's Anglican architecture is haunted by a future that Cram himself could not provide, and through the intricate intersections of Gothic aesthetics, architectural ethics, and company town construction in Edwardian Canada, Cameron Macdonell opens new perspectives on the modern failure to resurrect the past. What came back from the Gothic grave was a tormented revenant in need of miraculous intervention. Painstakingly researched and illustrated, Ghost Storeys is a microhistory that redefines the allegorical relationship between a marginalized Canadian church and the Gothic Revival as a global interdisciplinary phenomenon."-- |
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| Item Description: | Includes bibliographical references and index |
| ISBN: | 0773549897 |