Presenting a variety of approaches to late eighteenth-and nineteenth-century Gothic literature, this collection provides a transnational view of the emergence and flowering of the Gothic. Its focus on British, American, Continental, Caribbean and Asian literature deepens our understanding of the Gothic as not merely a national but a global aesthetic.
Offering a variety of critical approaches to late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Gothic literature, this collection provides a transnational view of the emergence and flowering of the Gothic. The essays expand on now well-known approaches to the Gothic (such as those that concentrate exclusively on race, gender, or nation) by focusing on international issues: religious traditions, social reform, economic and financial pitfalls, manifest destiny and expansion, changing concepts of nationhood, and destabilizing moments of empire-building. By examining a wide array of Gothic texts, including novels, drama, and poetry, the contributors present the Gothic not as a peripheral, marginal genre, but as a central mode of literary exchange in an ever-expanding global context. Thus the traditional conventions of the Gothic, such as those associated with Ann Radcliffe and Monk Lewis, are read alongside unexpected Gothic formulations and lesser-known Gothic authors and texts. These include Mary Rowlandson and Bram Stoker, Frances and Anthony Trollope, Louisa May Alcott, Elizabeth Gaskell, Theodore Dreiser, Rudyard Kipling, and Lafcadio Hearn, as well as the actors Edmund Kean and George Frederick Cooke. Individually and collectively, the essays provide a much-needed perspective that eschews national borders in order to explore the central role that global (and particularly transatlantic) exchange played in the development of the Gothic. British, American, Continental, Caribbean, and Asian Gothic are represented in this collection, which seeks to deepen our understanding of the Gothic as not merely a national but a global aesthetic.
'... satisfying collection of essays ... [the editors] situation the thrust of the collection away from narrower concerns of extremes and limits of genres relating to monsters residing on a cultural periphery by seeing Gothic writers bringing 'national secrets into the light of a more egalitarian and global context'.' Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 'This collection of essays on the transnational Gothic makes a timely contribution to a growing scholarship on global exchanges between literatures. ... will shape future scholarly analysis of a unified, complex Gothic.' Keats-Shelley Journal 'With strong underlying currents that include the frontier, Indian wars, slavery and the Civil War, it remains primarily of interest to scholars of American literature, and the American Gothic in particular, but enriches the reader's understanding of what these terms might fully entail, and does a very good job of filling in the blanks of what emerges, like the United States, as the product of a complex and fascinating web of global exchanges and interactions.' Supernatural Studies
