EcoGothic

Edited by Andrew Smith, William Hughes

Publication date:

26 August 2016

Length of book:

216 pages

Publisher

Manchester University Press

Dimensions:

216x138mm

ISBN-13: 9781526106896

This book will provide the first study of how the Gothic engages with ecocritical ideas. Ecocriticism has frequently explored images of environmental catastrophe, the wilderness, the idea of home, constructions of 'nature', and images of the post-apocalypse – images which are also central to a certain type of Gothic literature. By exploring the relationship between the ecocritical aspects of the Gothic and the Gothic elements of the ecocritical, this book provides a new way of looking at both the Gothic and ecocriticism. Writers discussed include Ann Radcliffe, Mary Shelley, Ambrose Bierce, Algernon Blackwood, Margaret Atwood, Cormac McCarthy, Dan Simmons and Rana Dasgupta. The volume thus explores writing and film across various national contexts including Britain, America and Canada, as well as giving due consideration to how such issues might be discussed within a global context.

1. Introduction: defining the ecoGothic - Andrew Smith and William Hughes
2. Panic, paranoia, and pathos: ecocriticism in the eighteenth-century Gothic novel - Lisa Kröger
3. Monsters on the Ice and global warming: From Mary Shelley and Sir John Franklin to Margaret Atwood and Dan Simmons - Catherine Lanone
4. Algernon Blackwood: nature and spirit - David Punter
5. 'A strange kind of evil': superficial paganism and false ecology in The Wicker Man - William Hughes
6. Bodies on earth: exploring sites of the Canadian ecoGothic - Alanna F. Bondar
7. Margaret Atwood's monsters in the Canadian ecoGothic - Shoshannah Ganz
8. From Salem Witch to Blair Witch: the Puritan Influence on American Gothic nature -Tom J. Hillard
9. 'The Blank Darkness Outside': Ambrose Bierce and wilderness Gothic at the end of the frontier - Kevin Corstorphine
10. Locating subjectivity in the post-apocalypse: the American Gothic journeys of Jack Kerouac, Cormac McCarthy, and Jim Crace - Andrew Smith
11. A Gothic apocalypse: encountering the monstrous in American cinema - Susan J. Tyburski
12. The riddle was the angel in the house: towards an American ecofeminist Gothic - Emily Carr
13. 'Uncanny States': global ecoGothic and the world-ecology in Rana Dasgupta's Tokyo Cancelled - Sharae Deckard
Index

‘As a platform for the development of a distinct ecoGothic theoretical framework, this volume certainly provides some tantalizing ideas, but equally, it invites further academic study surrounding ‘dark ecology’ as a convention to explore contemporary socio-political anxieties.’
Teresa Fitzpatrick, The Dark Arts Journal Volume 3.1 April 2017