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Susan Castillo Street weaves a feisty autobiographical web of familial relationships, cottonmouths, cicadas and crabbing amongst many other varied subjects; a 'bayou fusillade' (The Alchemist) of images and well-hewn narratives from a Southern Gothic childhood to the present day. Be ready to be transported to Mississippi and beyond by this vivid and intriguing collection brimming with the lessons of a well-lived life. Jill Munro, Author of The Quilted Multiverse and The Man from La Paz Susan Castillo Street's poems, in the first section in particular, read like short films such is their sense of place, characters, narrative, and tension. Gothic there is here yet also tenderness, humour, and ...
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.
This book examines ‘Southern Gothic’ - a term that describes some of the finest works of the American Imagination. But what do ‘Southern’ and ‘Gothic’ mean, and how are they related? Traditionally seen as drawing on the tragedy of slavery and loss, ‘Southern Gothic’ is now a richer, more complex subject. Thirty-five distinguished scholars explore the Southern Gothic, under the categories of Poe and his Legacy; Space and Place; Race; Gender and Sexuality; and Monsters and Voodoo. The essays examine slavery and the laws that supported it, and stories of slaves who rebelled and those who escaped. Also present are the often-neglected issues of the Native American presence in the South, socioeconomic class, the distinctions among the several regions of the South, same-sex relationships, and norms of gendered behaviour. This handbook covers not only iconic figures of Southern literature but also other less well-known writers, and examines gothic imagery in film and in contemporary television programmes such as True Blood and True Detective.
Exploring the proliferation of polyphonic texts following the first contact between Europeans and the indigenous peoples of the Americas, this book is an important advance in the study of early American literature and writings of colonial encounter.
American Literature in Context to 1865 discusses the issues and events that engaged American writers of the period, providing original and useful readings of important literary works that demonstrate how context contributes to meaning Covers a range of genres including the myths, chants and songs of indigenous cultures, sermons, slave narratives, essays and the novels and poetry to 1865 Designed to be used alongside the major anthologies of literature from the period Equips students with the necessary historical context needed to understand the writings from this period Pedagogical features include a detailed bibliography, and a transatlantic timeline, with literary works, and historical events
As baby boomers gray, cinematic depictions of aging and the aged are on the rise. In the horror genre, fears of growing old take on fantastic proportions. Elderly characters are portrayed as either eccentric harbingers of doom--the crone who stops at nothing to restore her youth, the ancient ancestor who haunts the living--or as frail victims. This collection of new essays explores how various filmic portrayals of aging, as an inescapable horror destined to overtake us all, reflect our complex attitudes toward growing old, along with its social, psychological and economic consequences.
This rich and diverse collection of essays explores the literary and ideological cultural exchanges between Britain and New England from 1610 to 1910. The contributors embrace material studies of written and printed texts, performance, the novel, expository writing, and early film. Through intriguingly fresh readings of the work of writers ranging from Anne Bradstreet to Walt Whitman and from John Winthrop, Jr., to Jack London, the book examines the intellectual and aesthetic exchanges produced by transatlantic cultural traffic. The focus and detail of the essays make an important contribution to the ongoing debates about British-American transatlantic literary exchanges, highlighting the conversions, adjustments, and translations in the transnational circulation of culture. This book will appeal to a broad spectrum of scholars in American, British, and Transatlantic literary studies.
“Simply put, there is absolutely nothing on the market with the range of ambition of this strikingly eclectic collection of essays. Not only is it impossible to imagine a more comprehensive view of the subject, most readers – even specialists in the subject – will find that there are elements of the Gothic genre here of which they were previously unaware.” - Barry Forshaw, Author of British Gothic Cinema and Sex and Film The Palgrave Handbook of Contemporary Gothic is the most comprehensive compendium of analytic essays on the modern Gothic now available, covering the vast and highly significant period from 1918 to 2019. The Gothic sensibility, over 200 years old, embraces its dark p...
A History of the Literature of the U.S. South provides scholars with a dynamic and heterogeneous examination of southern writing from John Smith to Natasha Trethewey. Eschewing a master narrative limited to predictable authors and titles, the anthology adopts a variegated approach that emphasizes the cultural and political tensions crucial to the making of this regional literature. Certain chapters focus on major white writers (e.g., Thomas Jefferson, William Faulkner, the Agrarians, Cormac McCarthy), but a substantial portion of the work foregrounds the achievements of African American writers like Frederick Douglass, Zora Neale Hurston, and Sarah Wright to address the multiracial and transnational dimensions of this literary formation. Theoretically informed and historically aware, the volume's contributors collectively demonstrate how southern literature constitutes an aesthetic, cultural and political field that richly repays examination from a variety of critical perspectives.
The Gothic has always been interested in strange utterances and unsettling voices – from half-heard ghostly murmurings and the admonitions of the dead, to the terrible cries of the monstrous nonhuman. Gothic Utterance is the first book-length study of the role played by such voices in the Gothic tradition, exploring their prominence and importance in the American literature produced between the Revolutionary War and the close of the nineteenth century. The book argues that the American Gothic foregrounds the overpowering affect and distressing significations of the voices of the dead, dying, abjected, marginalised or nonhuman, in order to undertake a sustained interrogation of what it means to be and speak as an American in this period. The American Gothic imagines new forms of relation between speaking subjects, positing more inclusive and expansive kinds of community, while also emphasising the ethical demands attending our encounters with Gothic voices. The Gothic suggests that how we choose to hear and respond to these voices says much about our relationship with the world around us, its inhabitants – dead or otherwise – and the limits of our own subjectivity and empathy.