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This book offers the first full length study on the pervasive archetype of The Gothic Forest in Western culture. The idea of the forest as deep, dark, and dangerous has an extensive history and continues to resonate throughout contemporary popular culture. The Forest and the EcoGothic examines both why we fear the forest and how exactly these fears manifest in our stories. It draws on and furthers the nascent field of the ecoGothic, which seeks to explore the intersections between ecocriticism and Gothic studies. In the age of the Anthropocene, this work importantly interrogates our relationship to and understandings of the more-than-human world. This work introduces the trope of the Gothic ...
Wolves lope across Gothic imagination. Signs of a pure animality opposed to humanity, in the figure of the werewolf they become liminal creatures that move between the human and the animal. Werewolves function as a site for exploring complex anxieties of difference – of gender, class, race, space, nation or sexuality – but the imaginative and ideological uses of wolves also reflect back on the lives of material animals, long persecuted in their declining habitats across the world. Werewolves therefore raise unsettling questions about the intersection of the real and the imaginary, the instability of human identities and the worldliness and political weight of the Gothic. This is the firs...
This volume is a study of human entanglements with Nature as seen through the mode of haunting. As an interruption of the present by the past, haunting can express contemporary anxieties concerning our involvement in the transformation of natural environments and their ecosystems, and our complicity in their collapse. It can also express a much-needed sense of continuity and relationality. The complexity of the question—who and what gets to be called human with respect to the nonhuman—is reflected in these collected chapters, which, in their analysis of cinematic and literary representations of sentient Nature within the traditional gothic trope of haunting, bring together history, race, postcolonialism, and feminism with ecocriticism and media studies. Given the growing demand for narratives expressing our troubled relationship with Nature, it is imperative to analyze this contested ground. “Chapter 6” is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.
Religious Horror and the Ecogothic explores the intersections of Anglophone Christianity and the Ecogothic, a subgenre that explores the ecocritical in Gothic literature, film, and media. Acknowledging the impact of Christian ideologies upon interpretations of human relationships with the environment, the Ecogothic in turn interrogates spiritual identity and humanity’s darker impulses in relation to ecological systems. Through a survey of Ecogothic texts from the eighteenth century to the present day, this book illuminates the ways in which a Christianized understanding of hierarchy, dominion, fear, and sublimity shapes reactions to the environment and conceptions of humanity’s place therein. It interrogates the discourses which inform environmental policy, as well as definitions of the “human” in a rapidly changing world.
In the context of the current explosion of interest in Gothic literature and popular culture, this interdisciplinary collection of essays explores for the first time the rich and long-standing relationship between war and the Gothic. Critics have described the global Seven Year’s War as the "crucible" from which the Gothic genre emerged in the eighteenth century. Since then, the Gothic has been a privileged mode for representing violence and extreme emotions and situations. Covering the period from the American Civil War to the War on Terror, this collection examines how the Gothic has provided writers an indispensable toolbox for narrating, critiquing, and representing real and fictional ...
Argues, contrary to most scholarly opinion, that while on the explicit level they are anti-Jewish, in a covert manner the dramatic works of the Spanish Golden Age present a positive image of the Jews. Works by Rojas, Cervantes, and, especially, Lope de Vega are shown to have used coded writing and techniques of dissimulation to subvert the dominant anti-Jewish ideology of the day, embodied in the actions of the Inquisition and in the "limpieza de sangre" statutes. A reason for the indirect approach was that the writers, who were influenced by Christian Humanism rather than by any putative Converso origin, themselves sought to escape interrogation by the Inquisition. One technique used was to replace the Converso by the figure of a persecuted woman or by a biblical, legendary, or foreign Jew. Defending the Jews was an aspect of espousal of justice for all.
Meanwhile, by assimilating the Other into our own modes of representation of reality and imagination, twentieth-century female writers of the fantastic show how alternative identities can be shaped and social constituencies can be challenged."--BOOK JACKET.
From early examples of queer representation in mainstream media to present-day dissolutions of the human-nature boundary, the Gothic is always concerned with delineating and transgressing the norms that regulate society and speak to our collective fears and anxieties. This volume examines British and American Gothic texts from four centuries and diverse media – including novels, films, podcasts, and games – in case studies which outline the central relationship between the Gothic and transgression, particularly gender(ed) and sexual transgression. This relationship is both crucial and constantly shifting, ever in the process of renegotiation, as transgression defines the Gothic and society redefines transgression. The case studies draw on a combination of well-studied and under-studied texts in order to arrive at a more comprehensive picture of transgression in the Gothic. Pointing the way forward in Gothic Studies, this original and nuanced combination of gendered, Ecogothic, queer, and media critical approaches addresses established and new scholars of the Gothic alike.
Beyond the Family Romance explores parallels between Pascoli's work and such writers as Tarchetti, Boito, Poe, and Invernizio.