Anya Heise-von der Lippe - Böcker

Posthuman Gothic is an edited collection of thirteen chapters, and offers a structured, dialogical contribution to the discussion of the posthuman Gothic. Contributors explore the various ways in which posthuman thought intersects with Gothic textuality and mediality. The texts and media under discussion – from I am Legend to In the Flesh, and from Star Trek to The Truman Show, transgress the boundaries of genre, moving beyond the traditional scope of the Gothic. These texts, the contributors argue, destabilise ideas of the human in a number of ways. By confronting humanity and its Others, they introduce new perspectives on what we traditionally perceive as human. Drawing on key texts of both Gothic and posthumanist theory, the contributors explore such varied themes as posthuman vampire and zombie narratives, genetically modified posthumans, the posthuman in video games, film and TV, the posthuman as a return to nature, the posthuman’s relation to classic monster narratives, and posthuman biohorror and theories of prometheanism and accelerationism. In its entirety, the volume offers a first attempt at addressing the various intersections of the posthuman and the Gothic in contemporary literature and media.

Monstrous textuality emerges when Gothic narratives like Frankenstein reflect the monstrous in their narrative structure to create narratives of resistance, and allows writers to meta-narratively reflect their own poetics and textual production, and reclaim authority over their work under circumstances of systemic cultural oppression and Othering. This book traces the representation of other Others through Black feminist hauntology in Toni Morrison's Beloved (1987) and Love (2003); it explores fat freak embodiment as a feminist resistance strategy in Angela Carter's Nights at the Circus (1984) and Margaret Atwood's Lady Oracle (1976); and it reads Atwood's MaddAddam trilogy (2003-13) and Shelley Jackson's Patchwork Girl (1995) within a framework of critical posthumanist and cyborg theory. The result is a comprehensive argument about how these texts can be read within a framework of critical posthumanist questioning of knowledge production, and of epistemological exploration, beyond the exclusionary humanist paradigm.

Look into the dark mirror of the Gothic text and you will become aware of the strange and uncanny aspects of familiar spaces. The twelve chapters in this collection are enquiries into the nature of Gothic spatiality, exploring Gothic spaces from Italy to Cornwall to small-town USA, looking at Gothic locations like the London suburbs and a remote mining town in the Indian jungle, or Gothic buildings like the Paris opera, the haunted high-rise buildings of Finnish suburbia, or a semi-abandoned North-American motel. Reading Gothic spaces as reflections of various cultures, the contributors not only explore Gothic localities, which possess the potential to raise a number of critical questions, but also examine Gothic mind-sets like those evoked by enclosed, segregated, remote, lonely, haunted, strange or suddenly unfamiliar spaces. Bringing together a variety of critical perspectives, the collection will be of interest to academics and students interested in the Gothic, literary and cultural studies, film and media studies as well as creative writing and popular culture.

In the Romantic period, women writers developed specific aesthetics and writing strategies in their engagements with climate change and climate catastrophe. Anya Heise-von der Lippe draws on intersectional feminist and ecocritical approaches to highlight gender as a complicating category in Romantic engagements with these topics. She addresses the ways in which gendered critical framings continue to resonate in current Anthropocene discourses that use Romantic conceptualizations of »Nature«, impacting contemporary approaches to the relationship between humans and non-humans in the ongoing climate catastrophe.