Expanding the Gothic Canon

Anna Kędra-Kardela is Associate Professor of English Literature at Maria Curie-Skłodowska University, Lublin (Poland). She published on metaphysical poetry, cognitive poetics, narratology, and the Anglo-Irish short story.Andrzej Sławomir Kowalczyk is Assistant Professor of English Literature at Maria Curie-Skłodowska University, Lublin (Poland). His publications include studies in medieval drama, the supernatural in fiction, as well as utopia/dystopia in literature and film.

«This book is concerned with Gothicism as a cultural category. The chapters discuss extra-canonical works representing uncharted fields within the domain of narrative fiction, film, and video games. The volume comprises original and illuminating studies, opening new vistas to the scholarly research into the Gothic.» (Prof. Joanna Kokot, The Warmia and Mazury University in Olsztyn, Poland)«This collection will appeal to anyone – general reader or specialist, student or teacher or scholar – with an interest in the Gothic or even just a casual curiosity about it. The essays will expand readers’ horizons as well as the Gothic canon, demonstrating to anyone who might not already realize it that the exuberantly undead Gothic mode continues both to entertain and to do the essential cultural work of conservation, subversion and recuperation.» (Prof. John M. Krafft, Miami University, Ohio)

• Contents: Anna Kędra-Kardela/Andrzej Sławomir Kowalczyk: The Gothic Canon: Contexts, Features, Relationships, Perspectives – Artur Blaim: Gothic Castaways: Dreams, Demons and Monsters in Early Modern Desert Island Narratives – Wojciech Nowicki: Ambivalence and Ambiguity in Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey – Aleksandra Kędzierska: A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens’s Ghostly Academy – Dorota Babilas: The Undead Queen: Queen Victoria’s Afterlife in Gothic Fiction – Jorge Bastos da Silva: First-Person Noir: Murderousness and (Ir)rationality in Twentieth-Century Crime Fiction – Ludmiła Gruszewska Blaim: Faculty Gothic in the American College Novel of the 1990s – Urszula Terentowicz-Fotyga: Competing Genres in the English Country House: The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters – Jadwiga Węgrodzka: Ghosts and Their Stories in Children’s Fiction – Justyna Galant: In the Bowels of a Gothic Microverse: Delicatessen as a Semiotic Palimpsest – Zofia Kolbuszewska: Gothic Automata and the Kunstkammer Island: The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes by Quay Brothers – Marta Komsta: The Murder House, or the Archaic Mother in American Horror Story – Pawel Frelik: Gothic Videogames.