The Gothic Body: Sexuality, Materialism, and Degeneration at the Fin de Siecle by Kelly Hurley

An accessible and deliciously horrifying book about turn-of-the-century Gothic. It's not very heavy on theory, and all the ideas are laid out in an incredibly coherent and lucid way. I think Hurley stretched a lot of points, but overall, it's extremely interesting and persuasive in its arguments. The book mostly discussed relatively little-known books, and one of the pleasures of reading it was that the summaries of them read like hilariously terrible 1950s b-movies; man-eating underwater monsters, man-eating trees, man-eating insects, man-eating fungi.... you can almost see the terrible special effects. I'm glad it wasn't too heavy on theory, and it introduced me to a lot of concepts that I did not know before in a very coherent and lucid form.