Jimmy Packham – författare

Littoral zones such as haunted shorelines, oppressively expansive beaches, and the crumbling edgelands around coastal cliffs have been an indelible feature of the Gothic literary tradition since the eighteenth century. They are frequently portrayed as strange, interstitial realms, sites of epistemic and existential precarity, of wreckage and uncanny returns, poised between the homely and unhomely, whose intense openness to the world(s) beyond contend uneasily (yet valuably) with the imagined integrity of selves and nations: it is a region, above all, of unsettlement. Coastal Gothic, 1719-2020 offers the first long-form examination of the coastal Gothic. Focusing on British and Irish Gothic authors and on the fraught political and human histories of the coastline, this Element examines the function of littoral terror, hauntings, and uncanny encounters as a means of unsettling pervasive conceptions of identity at national, regional, and individual levels.

Littoral zones such as haunted shorelines, oppressively expansive beaches, and the crumbling edgelands around coastal cliffs have been an indelible feature of the Gothic literary tradition since the eighteenth century. They are frequently portrayed as strange, interstitial realms, sites of epistemic and existential precarity, of wreckage and uncanny returns, poised between the homely and unhomely, whose intense openness to the world(s) beyond contend uneasily (yet valuably) with the imagined integrity of selves and nations: it is a region, above all, of unsettlement. Coastal Gothic, 1719-2020 offers the first long-form examination of the coastal Gothic. Focusing on British and Irish Gothic authors and on the fraught political and human histories of the coastline, this Element examines the function of littoral terror, hauntings, and uncanny encounters as a means of unsettling pervasive conceptions of identity at national, regional, and individual levels.

The Gothic has always been interested in strange utterances and unsettling voices: from half-heard ghostly murmurings and the admonitions of the dead, to the terrible cries of the monstrous nonhuman. Gothic Utterance offers the first book-length study of the role such voices play in the Gothic tradition, exploring their prominence and importance in the American literature produced between the Revolutionary War and the close of the nineteenth century. This book argues that the American Gothic foregrounds the overpowering affect and distressing significations of the voices of the dead, dying, abjected, marginalised or nonhuman, in order to undertake a sustained interrogation of what it means to be and speak as an American in this period. The American Gothic imagines new forms of relation between speaking subjects, positing more inclusive and expansive forms of community. Gothic Utterance also emphasises the ethical demands attending our encounters with Gothic voices: the Gothic suggests that how we choose to hear and respond to these voices says much about our relationship with the world around us, its inhabitants - dead or otherwise - and the limits of our own subjectivity and empathy.

The Gothic has always been interested in strange utterances and unsettling voices – from half-heard ghostly murmurings and the admonitions of the dead, to the terrible cries of the monstrous nonhuman. Gothic Utterance is the first book-length study of the role played by such voices in the Gothic tradition, exploring their prominence and importance in the American literature produced between the Revolutionary War and the close of the nineteenth century. The book argues that the American Gothic foregrounds the overpowering affect and distressing significations of the voices of the dead, dying, abjected, marginalised or nonhuman, in order to undertake a sustained interrogation of what it means to be and speak as an American in this period. The American Gothic imagines new forms of relation between speaking subjects, positing more inclusive and expansive kinds of community, while also emphasising the ethical demands attending our encounters with Gothic voices. The Gothic suggests that how we choose to hear and respond to these voices says much about our relationship with the world around us, its inhabitants – dead or otherwise – and the limits of our own subjectivity and empathy.