Religious Horror and the Ecogothic

Kathleen Hudson is adjunct professor at the United States Naval Academy and Anne Arundel Community College.Mary Going is British Academy postdoctoral research associate at the University of Sheffield.

This collection highlights the centrality of nature in literary narrative, juxtaposed with the catastrophe of climate change. The combined, and somewhat contorted, denial of “humanity’s impact on the environment” (p. 7) and the rhetoric of dominion and stewardship espousals by reactionary Evangelical Christians are contrasted with a view of humanity as interacting with nature. Analysis of the trope of the whale—from the Book of Jonah to Cotton Mather’s jeremiad on “the monstrous features of baleen whales” (p. 26), to Jonathan Greenaway’s delineation of how Captain Ahab’s monomaniacal pursuit enables “countervailing discourses of resistance” (p. 84)—shows how acknowledging the power of sea animals dislodges human complacency. Christopher M. Scott’s analysis of Algernon Blackwood’s The Glamour of the Snow shows how the story can horrify and entertain, but also mime spiritual growth. Conversely, by deploying the theories of Charles Taylor, Madeline Potter shows how the horror fiction of J. Sheridan Le Fanu practices an “occlusive re-enactment” (p. 111) that cements profane horror ahead of sacred reassurance. An epilogue linking climate change to the current fighting in Gaza foregrounds the urgency that yokes the polyvalent analyses at play in this volume. Recommended. Advanced undergraduates through faculty.

• Table of ContentsAcknowledgmentsIntroductionApproaches to Anglophone Religious Horror and the EcogothicBy Kathleen Hudson and Mary GoingPart One: Early Gothic OriginsChapter OneBiblical Marine Biology: Cotton Mather’s Cetological Exegesis and the Oceanic EcogothicBy Jennifer SchellChapter Two“The lady’s talent for description leads her to excess”: Radcliffe, Landscape, and GenderBy Rosemary WhitcombeChapter ThreeSacred Consumption: An Ecocritical Reading of Gothic CannibalismBy Laura R. KremmelPart Two: Long Nineteenth Century EvolutionsChapter FourBetween Domination and Sublimity: The Ecogothic and Moby DickBy Jonathan GreenawayChapter FiveOcclusive Re-Enchantment: J.S. Le Fanu’s EcogothicBy Madeline PotterChapter SixEcological Hellscapes of Religious Doubt: Exploring Gothic Nature and the Horrific Divine in Gerard Manley Hopkins and James ThomsonBy Ruth-Anne WalbankChapter SevenStrange Summits: Christian Hope and Salvation in the Mountain Topography of Algernon Blackwood’s “The Glamour of the Snow”By Christopher M. ScottPart Three: Twentieth Century ReimaginingsChapter EightAnthropocenic anxieties: What humanity should not have summoned in H.P. Lovecraft’s “The Call of Cthulhu” and William Hope Hodgson’s The Nightlandby Antonio Alcalá GonzálezChapter Nine“Are We Not Men?”: Dominionism and the Evolution of The Island of Doctor MoreauBy Mary GoingChapter Ten“A strange green God”: Ecocritical Readings of Christian and Cult Sacrifice in Postmodern Folk HorrorBy Kathleen HudsonPart Four: Contemporary EcohorrorsChapter ElevenEcogothic Meets Religious Horror in M. Night Shyamalan’s The HappeningAgnieszkaChapter TwelveOryx and Eve: Geneses, Gender, and the Gothic in Margaret Atwood’s Maddaddam trilogyBy Lauren NixonChapter ThirteenAtavistic Trolls and Christian Immorality in Nordic EcogothicKaja FranckAfterwordOur Burning WorldBy Kathleen Hudson and Mary GoingIndexAbout the Contributors