Anthem Studies in Gothic Literature – serie

Neo-Gothic Narratives defines and theorises what, exactly, qualifies as such a text, what mobilises the employment of the Gothic to speak to our own times, whether nostalgia plays a role and whether there is room for humour besides the sobriety and horror in these narratives across various media. What attracts us to the Gothic that makes us want to resurrect, reinvent, echo it? Why do we let the Gothic redefine us? Why do we let it haunt us? Does it speak to us through intertexuality, self-reflectivity, metafiction, immersion, affect? Are we reclaiming the history of women and other subalterns in the Gothic that had been denied in other forms of history? Are we revisiting the trauma of English colonisation and seeking national identity? Or are we simply tourists who enjoy cruising through the otherworld? The essays in this volume investigate both the readerly experience of Neo-Gothic narratives as well as their writerly pastiche.

Originally published in 1860, the formative Gothic novel ‘Sir Rohan’s Ghost’ by Harriet Prescott Spofford (1835–1921), one of nineteenth-century America’s most significant woman writers, relates the tale of a tormented British aristocrat who struggles to retain his sanity while suffering horrifying visitations from the spectre of his dead lover amid the agonies of an already fragile mind. Setting her tale in the enigmatic Sir Rohan’s beautiful-yet-decaying estate, Spofford immerses readers in a ghost story that marries lush imagery with an atmosphere of impending, mysterious doom. Upon its initial publication, a reviewer writing for ‘The Baltimore Sun’ deemed ‘Sir Rohan’s Ghost’ as ‘a strange, weird production, fascinating and exciting […] A work of genius and not without moral significance’. Dating from a time when women writers like Spofford were increasingly making their voices heard by reshaping the character of popular American literature, ‘Sir Rohan’s Ghost’ remains to this day an engaging and important work of Gothic fiction.

The twelve Gothic tales of this collection span the nineteenth-century South and are from some of the most famous writers of the age, such as Edgar Allan Poe, to more recently rediscovered and now celebrated writers such as Kate Chopin and Charles Chesnutt, to the completely and unfairly obscure E. Levi Brown.  Companion readings—some themselves quite chilling—are by celebrated writers and well-known historical figures, such as Thomas Jefferson, Charles Brockden Brown, Jacques Dessalines, and W. E. B DuBois.  These readings place the fiction in the context of the South and the Caribbean: the revolution in Haiti, Nat Turner’s rebellion, the realities of slavery and the myths spun by its apologists, the aftermath of the Civil War, and the brutalities of Jim Crow laws.

The Cultural Construction of Monstrous Children raises important questions at the heart of society and culture, and through an interdisciplinary, trans-cultural analysis presents important findings on socio-cultural representations and embodiments of the child and childhood. At the start of the 21st, new anxieties constellate around the child and childhood, while older concerns have re-emerged, mutated, and grown stronger. But as historical analysis shows, they have been ever-present concerns.This innovative and interdisciplinary collection of essays considers examples of monstrous children since the 16th century to the present, spanning real-life and popular culture, to exhibit the manifestation of the Western cultural anxiety around the problematic, anomalous child as naughty, dangerous, or just plain evil.The book takes an inter- and multidisciplinary approach, drawing upon fields as diverse as sociology, psychology, film, and literature, to study the role of the child and childhood within contemporary Western culture and to see the historic ways in which each discipline intersects and influences the other.

The Colombian Gothic in Cinema and Literature traces the aesthetic and political development of the Gothic genre in Colombia. Gabriel Eljaiek-Rodríguez shows how, in the hands of Colombian writers and filmmakers, Gothic tropes are taken to their extremes to reflect particularly Colombian issues, like the ongoing armed conflict in the country since the 1950s as various left wing guerillas, government factions and paramilitary groups escalated violence. In this context, collectives such as the “Cali group” challenge both the centrality of US and European Gothics as well as the centrality of Bogota-centered perspectives of Colombian politics and conflict. The book demonstrates how writers and filmmakers transform the European and American Gothic to show genealogical links between colonization, imperialism and domestic elites’ maintenance of social inequalities.

The Gothic Literature and History of New England surveys the history, nature and future of the Gothic mode in the region, from the witch trials through the Black Lives Matter Movement. Texts include Cotton Mather and other Puritan divines who collected folklore of the supernatural; the Frontier Gothic of Indian captivity narratives; the canonical authors of the American Renaissance such as Melville and Hawthorne; the women's ghost story tradition and the Domestic Gothic from Harriet Beecher Stowe to Charlotte Perkins Gilman to Shirley Jackson; H. P. Lovecraft; Stephen King; and writers of the current generation who respond to racial and gender issues. The work brings to the surface the religious intolerance, racism and misogyny inherent in the New England Gothic, and how these nightmares continue to haunt literature and popular culture—films, television and more.

Archipelagothic: The Gothic in Philippine Culture is an edited collection that brings together essays examining the place of the gothic in Philippine culture. This groundbreaking volume, the first book on the topic, is appropriately comprehensive, covering a range of genres, historical periods, regions, and languages. While the essays in this collection do not reach a consensus regarding the gothic, they all refract the meaning of the term to expand its utility, so that it may properly speak to the Philippines’s longue durée of multiple colonialisms and various regional cultures that coexist under the umbrella of the nation. The various permutations of the gothic within the various regional cultures, languages, colonial histories, and uneven experiences of globalization are what the editor of this volume refers to as instances of “archipelagothic.” All the contributors are recognized experts in their areas of study, and their essays were specifically commissioned for this volume, which includes the gothic in (1) Philippine literature in English, (2) Tagalog literature, (3) regional literature, (4) cinema, (5) TV, and (6) comics and graphic novels. Archipelagothic will be an excellent introductory text as well as a substantial resource to researchers working in the areas of gothic studies, postcolonial literature, and world literature broadly, and global-gothic and the postcolonial gothic, specifically.

The twelve Gothic tales of this collection span the nineteenth-century South and are from some of the most famous writers of the age, such as Edgar Allan Poe, to more recently rediscovered and now celebrated writers such as Kate Chopin and Charles Chesnutt, to the completely and unfairly obscure E. Levi Brown.  Companion readings—some themselves quite chilling—are by celebrated writers and well-known historical figures, such as Thomas Jefferson, Charles Brockden Brown, Jacques Dessalines, and W. E. B DuBois.  These readings place the fiction in the context of the South and the Caribbean: the revolution in Haiti, Nat Turner’s rebellion, the realities of slavery and the myths spun by its apologists, the aftermath of the Civil War, and the brutalities of Jim Crow laws.

The Colombian Gothic in Cinema and Literature traces the aesthetic and political development of the Gothic genre in Colombia. Gabriel Eljaiek-Rodríguez shows how, in the hands of Colombian writers and filmmakers, Gothic tropes are taken to their extremes to reflect particularly Colombian issues, like the ongoing armed conflict in the country since the 1950s as various left wing guerillas, government factions and paramilitary groups escalated violence. In this context, collectives such as the “Cali group” challenge both the centrality of US and European Gothics as well as the centrality of Bogota-centered perspectives of Colombian politics and conflict. The book demonstrates how writers and filmmakers transform the European and American Gothic to show genealogical links between colonization, imperialism and domestic elites’ maintenance of social inequalities.

This book argues that the process and experience of travel in Gothic literature provides a unique and transformative perspective on the relationship between fear and recurring cultural preoccupations from the late eighteenth century to the present, ranging from concerns about climate change or the presence of the unseen to the negotiation of cultural difference and the apprehension produced by various modes of modern transport and unknown/unknowable terrain. The book follows travellers who take many fictional forms – tourists, commuters, walkers, explorers, as well as the ‘armchair tourist’ or reader – as they encounter fascinating, strange and often disconcerting weathers, climates, landscapes and topographies. Gothic travel epitomises the wonder, excitement, suspicion or incomprehension that arises from journeys through familiar and unfamiliar terrain. While exposure to the wild, elemental or primitive could produce the elevation of the sublime in early Gothic, increasingly the experience of travel raised unsettling questions about people, places and environments that lay beyond established frames of knowledge. Gothic travellers are haunted, never alone, and the experience of journeying through these landscapes provokes fears that may shadow them even after they have returned to ‘home’ ground. Climates of Fear reveals the persistent ways in which Gothic narratives of travel confront fears about the environment, surveillance, (im)migration and the foreign. These abiding concerns speak loudly to the present time, however, when the encroachments on our immediate surroundings – from climate change, digital communication and geopolitical dislocation – seem at once remote and intimate, invisible yet urgent. Thus the book also asks whether recent portrayals of Gothic journeys now pose different questions to the reader.

This book argues that the process and experience of travel in Gothic literature provides a unique and transformative perspective on the relationship between fear and recurring cultural preoccupations from the late eighteenth century to the present, ranging from concerns about climate change or the presence of the unseen to the negotiation of cultural difference and the apprehension produced by various modes of modern transport and unknown/unknowable terrain. The book follows travellers who take many fictional forms – tourists, commuters, walkers, explorers, as well as the ‘armchair tourist’ or reader – as they encounter fascinating, strange and often disconcerting weathers, climates, landscapes and topographies. Gothic travel epitomises the wonder, excitement, suspicion or incomprehension that arises from journeys through familiar and unfamiliar terrain. While exposure to the wild, elemental or primitive could produce the elevation of the sublime in early Gothic, increasingly the experience of travel raised unsettling questions about people, places and environments that lay beyond established frames of knowledge. Gothic travellers are haunted, never alone, and the experience of journeying through these landscapes provokes fears that may shadow them even after they have returned to ‘home’ ground. Climates of Fear reveals the persistent ways in which Gothic narratives of travel confront fears about the environment, surveillance, (im)migration and the foreign. These abiding concerns speak loudly to the present time, however, when the encroachments on our immediate surroundings – from climate change, digital communication and geopolitical dislocation – seem at once remote and intimate, invisible yet urgent. Thus the book also asks whether recent portrayals of Gothic journeys now pose different questions to the reader.

The book explores the Gothic tradition in Swedish literature. It aims to give an overview of the development of Swedish Gothic from the Romantic age until today and to highlight the characteristic features of the Swedish tradition of Gothic in relation to transnational developments, in particular in relation to the Anglo-American tradition. By using a contextualising comparative perspective, it highlights the most prevalent and prominent feature of Swedish Gothic, the significance of the Nordic landscape, the wilderness and local folklore. In Swedish fiction, the terror is not pointing to the medieval period but is located in pre-Christian, pagan times. Especially in today’s Gothic narratives, the presence of mythical creatures and nature beings, such as trolls, tomtes or vittras enhances the Gothic atmosphere. Other domestic trends are Gothic crime stories, where supernatural creatures and powers constantly obstruct the modern crime investigation, and the use of gendered and female monsters.

Gulf Gothic examines haunted, secret-laden narratives that emerge from the gulfs between peoples all along the Gulf of Mexico and on both sides of the Rio Grande. The Gulf is presented as a single transnational region and as dynamic ground zero of North American (and global) cross-culturality and trauma. Responding to the long history of Mesoamerican writing, plantation systems, and racialized divides across the region, this study argues that gothic—with all its affect, undead figures, heavy weather, and hauntings—provides a powerful lens through which to awaken the kinds of gulf-traversing vision so necessary to us here and now.

Theology in the Early British and Irish Gothic, 1764–1834 reassesses the relationship between contemporary theology and the Gothic. Investigating Gothic aesthetics, depictions of the supernatural and portrayals of religious organisations, it explores how the Gothic engages with contemporary theologies, both Dissenting and Anglican. Moving away from the emphasis on either a monolithic Protestantism or on the Gothic as a secular mode, it shows the ways in which the Gothic exploration of the transcendent and the obscure cannot be separated from the diverse theologies of its day. The project maps how the Gothic not only reflects but actively engages in the theological debates and controversies contemporary to its efflorescence.

There has been a cohesive cultural response from Japan to the atomic bomb and its radiological consequences: cultural icon Godzilla, awakened by radiation, has been imagined repeatedly as a manifestation of the monstrous power of nuclear weapons and their after-effects. Though studies by Joseph Siracusa, Paul Brians, Joyce A. Evans and David Dowling address various representations of atomic power in literature and film, critical engagement regarding nuclear cultures has still primarily been political, ecological or scientific in focus, with limited work available on fictional and imagined nuclear texts and narratives. By reading Western, and particularly American, conceptualisations of atomic power (whether actual or imagined) as gothic, and by situating them in relation to their Japanese counterparts, Nuclear Gothic aims to rectify this critical dispersion and cultural gap; it also seeks to provide an interdisciplinary study of nuclear narratives as viewed through a specific critical lens, surveying atomic processes, nuclear fictions and specific historical and cultural moments as instances and products of the gothic mode.

Neo-Gothic Narratives defines and theorises what, exactly, qualifies as such a text, what mobilises the employment of the Gothic to speak to our own times, whether nostalgia plays a role and whether there is room for humour besides the sobriety and horror in these narratives across various media. What attracts us to the Gothic that makes us want to resurrect, reinvent, echo it? Why do we let the Gothic redefine us? Why do we let it haunt us? Does it speak to us through intertexuality, self-reflectivity, metafiction, immersion, affect? Are we reclaiming the history of women and other subalterns in the Gothic that had been denied in other forms of history? Are we revisiting the trauma of English colonisation and seeking national identity? Or are we simply tourists who enjoy cruising through the otherworld? The essays in this volume investigate both the readerly experience of Neo-Gothic narratives as well as their writerly pastiche.

The book defines and discusses Fen Gothic, an example of regional Gothic inflected by geography, relationships of centre and margins, history, ecology and gender and the perspectives offered by related Gothic critical approaches. Fen Gothic is also understood through local myths, locations, and the historical, supernatural and human issues which are a major concern of work from this region.

California Gothic explores the California dream and its dark inversion as a nightmare, as illustrated in fiction, poetry, and film. California began as a literary invention, a magic island, in a Spanish romance before conquistadors first visited the land. From early days to the present, the California dream of happiness in a land of new beginnings has been maintained by suppression of disturbing realities: above all, the destruction of native peoples; and by events and facts such as the tragedy of the Donner Party, the persistence of poverty and crime in the golden land, disturbing crimes such as the Black Dahlia; and pandemics and ecological disaster. This book explores a rich Gothic tradition that exposes the repressed past and imagines the fates awaiting a failed California.

This monograph examines the centrality of dreams in early British Gothic novels and the significant transformations of the Gothic dream later in Victorian novels and ultimately in Caribbean novels. The Gothic arises at a time when Enlightenment philosophy and medical science are making dreams and nightmares exclusively internal phenomena, relegating them solely to the realm of the individual. This monograph argues that the Gothic counters this movement by reimagining dreams as social and political phenomena. They subsequently play vital roles in cultural responsesto the profound questions of the eighteenth, nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries—namely, those concerning historiography, revolution, slavery, and empire. What we see is a vacillation between the sublime and the monstrous that reveals anxieties about British claims of progress and liberty. In the process, the Gothic dream comes to be a liminal space for the dramatisation of imperial fantasies and prophetic nightmares. In the twentieth century, postcolonial writers adapt the Gothic dream to subvert the teleology of imperialism.

Gothic Appalachian Literature examines the ways contemporary Appalachian authors utilize gothic tropes to explore the complex history and contemporary problems of the region, particularly in terms of their representation of economic and environmental concerns. It argues that across Appalachian fiction, the plight of characters to save their homes, land and way of life from the destructive forces of extractive industries brings sharply to bare the histories of colonization and slavery that problematize questions of belonging, ownership and possession.Robertson extensively considers contemporary manifestations of the gothic in Appalachian literature, arguing that gothic tropes abound in fiction that focuses on the impacts of extractive industries that connect this micro-region with other parts of the Global North and Global South where the devastating impacts of extractive industries are also experienced socially, economically and environmentally.

The volume is organized chronologically in three parts that pursue a broader organizational trajectory, articulate the common genre characteristics, destabilize boundaries and emphasize socio-artistic ruptures, while establishing the place of German cultural output within the framework of the Anglo-German gothic phenomenon. Furthermore, the volume distinguishes itself through a focus on the evolution from these early texts through the adaptations and original contributions by authors of early nineteenth-century romantic narratives of the unexplained in prose and verse, emphasizing the evolution of forms both within and beyond the oeuvres of individual authors, generations and movements. The second wave of German Gothic features the rise of the fairy tale, folklore, collections of ghost stories, entertainment literature, philosophical treatises and literary journals through the neo-romantic works of the turn of the twentieth century. The volume concludes with reevaluations of the German canon and explorations of global responses, expanding the research focus to encompass the transmedial productions of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, including popular novellas, horror cinema, prestige television and indie and mainstream video games.

Taxidermy and the Gothic: The Horror of Still Life is the first extended study of the Gothic’s collusion with taxidermy. It tells the story of the emergence in the long nineteenth century of the twin golden ages of the Gothic genre and the practice of taxidermy, and their shared rhetorical and narratological strategies, anxieties, and sensibilities. It follows the thread into twentieth- and twenty-first-century culture, including recent horror film, fiction, television, and visual arts to argue that the Gothic and taxidermy are two discursive bodies, stuffed and stitched together. Moving beyond the well-worn path that treats taxidermy as a sentimental art or art of mourning, this book takes readers down a new dark trail, finding an overlooked but rich tradition in the Gothic that aligns it with the affective and corporeal work of horror and the unsettling aesthetics, experiences, and pleasures that come with it. Over the course of four chapters, it argues that in addition to entwined origins, taxidermy’s uncanny appearance in Gothic and horror texts is a driving force in generating fear. For taxidermy embodies the phenomenological horror of stuckness, of being there. In sum, taxidermy’s imbrication with the Gothic is more than skin deep: these are rich discourses stuffed by affinities for corporeal transgressions, the uncanny, and the counterfeit.

In late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century British literature, Scandinavia emerged as a setting for Gothic terror. This book explores the extensive use of Nordic superstition as it provided a vocabulary for Gothic texts, examining the cultural significance these references held for writers exploring Britain’s northern heritage. In Gothic publications, Nordic superstition sometimes parallels the representations of Catholicism, allowing writers to gloat at its phantasms and delusions. Thus, runic spells, incantations, and necromantic communications (of which Norse tradition afforded many examples) could replace practices usually assigned to Catholic superstition. Yet Nordic lore did more than merely supplant hackneyed Gothic formulas; it presented readers with an alternative conception of ‘Otherness’. Nordic texts—chiefly based on the Edda and the supernatural Scandinavian ballad tradition—were seen as pre-Christian beliefs of the Gothic (i.e., Germanic) peoples, including the Anglo-Saxons. The book traces the development of this Nordic Gothic, situating it within wider literary, historical, political, and cultural contexts.

This scholarly monograph examines the concept of Chernobyl trauma by situating it at the interface of clinical diagnoses of survivors’ Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, their expressions of this trauma in published testimonials translated into English, and through English-language literary explorations of contemporary Soviet trauma. It establishes a new perspective on the intergenerational and international reception of the nuclear disaster, one shaped by Soviet cultural memory as well as Science Fiction and the literary aesthetics of the Gothic. The monograph analyses first-generation Chernobyl survivors’ imaginative reconstruction of events through testimony in the face of the Soviet Party’s attempts to sublimate the narrative of the disaster into an official account. It also discusses the ways in which a second generation represents inherited, traumatic memory through a literary diaspora of Chernobyl and Soviet-Kazakh Semipalatinsk nuclear trauma, and how English-speaking writers not personally involved in the disaster engage in its memorialisation through discourses of horror and collective mourning.

Thomas Tod Stoddart is best remembered, if at all, for his angling poems, but few know the significance of Stoddart’s poetic output: when he burst onto the scene in 1831 as a 21-year-old romanticist with the incredible Gothic epic, The Death-Wake: Or Lunacy, a Necromaunt in Three Chimeras, he was anticipating Baudelaire, Poe and the Decadents, and crafting a new form of Scottish Gothic verse. Stoddart's poem is animated by a peculiar Gothic spirit: the title of the poem provides some indication of its utter strangeness and remarkable ubiquity. It tells the morbid and beautiful story of a monk who falls madly in love with a nun, Agathe, who dies in her youth. The monk, in a fit of madness, exhumes her body and voyages across the sea, encountering talking avatars of skeletons, a hermit and other sublime Gothic marvels.The Death-Wake spawned imitations and parodies in major intellectual magazines such as Blackwood's, and Stoddart was also intimately associated with James Hogg and his intellectual circle. Yet most copies of the poem were either destroyed or lost, and it languished out of print until its mysterious afterlife in the hands first of Edgar Allan Poe and then later of Andrew Lang (of Lang's Fairy Tales fame). Edgar Allan Poe, as the editor of Graham’s Magazine, reprinted a fragment of the poem in 1842 under a modified title, which was signed by one ‘Louis Fitzgerald Tasistro’, a mostly forgotten American lawyer, writer and acquaintance of Poe’s. He had evidently plagiarised it, which caused a minor scandal. Praised by Poe, the poem’s morbid themes uncannily intimate Poe’s own obsessions in poems published around the same time (including ‘Annabel Lee’ and others). George MacDonald, the noted fantasist, owned and commented on the book as an inspiration for his otherworldly work. Later, in 1895, Andrew Lang, publisher of The Yellow Book, reprinted The Death-Wake under John Lane’s imprint, bringing it to the readership of the 1890s and providing an introduction extolling its merits.This project will reprint, introduce and contextualise Stoddart’s poem for readers and, in the process, rediscover a Gothic writer of unparalleled imagination whose unique phantasmagoria are of as yet unexamined transatlantic cultural significance.

This study concerns a the dark, sensorial epistemologies emerging from intersections of documentary and horror cinema. From the ineffable subjects of horror documentaries and pseudo-documentaries, to the obsessive chroniclers of mockumentary horror cinema, the films examined here express generalized millennial and 21st-century archival anxiety around an unsettled and unsettling hypermediated reality. Part I focuses on gothumentaries, nonfiction works evoking the Gothic’s unreadable subjects and undetected realities. Case studies show key documentary films such as Capturing the Friedmans, Cropsey, and The Hellstrom Chronicle bringing Gothic-horror tropes and conventions to bear upon documentary subject matter to produce skepticism of American environmental, social, and national stability from the 1970s onward. Part II explores mockumentary, fake found-footage, and screen life horror cinema that turns to strategies of documentary and factual discourse to express an archival anxiety around human interaction with recording technologies. Case studies of pivotal films such as The Blair Witch Project, Diary of the Dead, Lake Mungo, Unfriended, Sickhouse, and We Are All Going to the World’s Fair turn to Gothic reflexivity as a way of expressing the subject’s relationship to, and experience of, a modernity that overwhelms in terms of its immensity, speed, and recordability.

This book seeks to excavate the changing status of the Gothic within what, after Raymond Williams, we might call the selective tradition, from approximately 1814 to 1921. Excavating the Castle demonstrates that the Gothic novel was present in the selective tradition almost from its inception, was present in the first durable consolidation of English literary history written after its emergence, and that the Gothic concept crystalized more than half a century earlier than historians of the Gothic had realized previously. The historiography of the Gothic has long been considered a settled story, though the findings of this book call that story into significant question. How did we miss so much of the story? This is above all a work of literary history, but it is a work of literary history designed to serve the needs of the field of Gothic studies. That said, it is also about more than the Gothic, implicating much larger issues related to the history of ideas; book history; information and library sciences; the materials, methods, and practice of literary history; the digital humanities; and even questions of individual positionality and human contingency.