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First Published in 2017. The first of its kind to address the ecogothic in American literature, this collection of fourteen articles illuminates a new and provocative literacy category, one that exists at the crossroads of the gothic and the environmental imagination, of fear and the ecosystems we inhabit.
List of contents
Table of Contents
Abstracts v
Introduction: Approaches to the Ecogothic
Dawn Keetley and Matthew Wynn Sivils 1
1. "Perverse Nature": Anxieties of Animality and Environment in Charles Brockden Brown’s
Edgar Huntly
Tom J. Hillard 33
2. "A Heap of Ruins": The Horrors of Deforestation in Leonora Sansay’s Secret History
Lisa M. Vetere 58
3. "The Earth was Groaning and Shaking": Landscapes of Slavery in The History of Mary Prince
Amanda Stuckey 80
4. "Give me my skin": William J. Snelling’s "A Night in the Woods" (1836) and the Gothic
Accusation against Buffalo Extinction
Jimmy L. Bryan Jr. 103
5. Failures to Signify: Poe’s Uncanny Animal Others
Kate Huber 130
6. Gothic Materialisms: Experimenting with Fire and Water in Edgar Allan Poe’s Tales of
(Im)mortality
Liz Hutter 152
7. "The Birth-Mark," "Rappaccini’s Daughter," and the Ecogothic
Lesley Ginsberg 180
8. Ghoulish Hinterlands: Ecogothic Confrontations in American Slave Narratives
Jericho Williams 212
9. Bleeding Feet and Failing Knees: The Ecogothic in Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Chasing Ice
Cari M. Carpenter 232
10. Vegetal Haunting: The Gothic Plant in Nineteenth-Century American Fiction
Matthew Wynn Sivils 253
11. Ecogothic Extinction Fiction: The Extermination of the Alaskan Mammoth
Jennifer Schell 275
12. Hyperobjects and the End of the World: Elemental Antagonists of American Naturalism
Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock 299
13. "Two Distinct Worlds"? Maintaining and Transgressing Boundaries of the HumAnimal
About the author
Dawn Keetley is Professor of English at Lehigh University, author of Making a Monster: Jesse Pomeroy, the Boy Murderer of 1870s Boston (University of Massachusetts Press, 2017), and co-editor of Plant Horror: Approaches to the Monstrous Vegetal in Fiction and Film (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016).
Matthew Wynn Sivils is professor of English at Iowa State University and the author of American Environmental Fiction, 1782-1847 (Ashgate/Routledge, 2014).
Summary
The first of its kind to address the ecogothic in American literature, this collection of fourteen articles illuminates a new and provocative literacy category, one that exists at the crossroads of the gothic and the environmental imagination, of fear and the ecosystems we inhabit.
