Haunted Nature

Sladja Blazan is Assistant Professor of American Studies at the University of Würzburg, Germany. Her areas of research include speculative fiction, critical posthumanism, critical refugee studies, and migration as a literary topic.

“Haunted Nature vitally adds to the ever-evolving theoretical landscape of the eco-gothic. … Blazan’s volume in particular offers fascinating exploration of nonhumans in human ideological constellations. … this collection of essays uniquely invents a revolutionary microscope for us to envision both the visible and invisible horrors to create a new approach. … Comprised of unconventional, popular speculative frictions, Haunted engages the reader with the serious, pressing and yet seemingly familiar environmental changes of the creepy-crawly 21st century.” (Rebecca Jordan, Journal of Ecohumanism, Vol. 2 (1), January, 2023)

• 1.Haunting and Nature: An Introduction.-2. Microgothic: Microbial Aesthetics of Haunted Nature.-3. Black Mold, White Extinction: I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House, The Haunting of Hill House, “Gray Matter,” and H. P. Lovecraft’s “The Shunned House”.-4.Vegetomorphism: Exploring the Material Within the Aesthetics of the EcoGothic in Stranger Things and Annihilation.-5. An Ecology of Abject Women: Frontier Gothicism and Ecofeminism in Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle.-6. Alligators in the Living Room: Terror and Horror in the Capitalocene.-7. Haunted Technonature: Anthropocene Coloniality in Ng Yi-Sheng’s Lion City (2018).-8. Haunted Nature, Haunted Humans: Intelligent Trees, Gaia, and the Apocalypse Meme.-9.The Global Poltergeist: COVID-19 Hauntings