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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.

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.

This article explores how Margaret Atwood engages with the literary trope of spectrality through the ghost of Lucy in “Death by Landscape” (1990), an enigmatic short story which can be fruitfully analyzed in the light of both the author’s critical writings and the spectropoetics introduced by Jacques Derrida. As an outstanding example of the Canadian Gothic, this brief narrative not only addresses the universal concerns of death and bereavement, but also raises more specific key issues, including present-day human relationships with the natural environment and the perception of geographical spaces as symbolic sites. Lucy’s ghostly presence haunting Lois draws special attention to the noxious effects of the modern appropriation of Native-American cultures, a controversial topic illustrated by the Indian-themed summer camp where Lucy mysteriously disappears and by her naïve friend Lois’s explicit desire “to be an Indian”. Additionally, Atwood’s short story evokes the physical displacement due to colonial expansion and recalls the ensuing social dislocation of the decimated Native populations, eventually almost erased from the actual and imaginary landscapes of North America.

This chapter contains sections titled: Here There Be Monsters Haunted by a Lack of Ghosts Local Familiars: Gothic Infusion Aboriginal Ghost‐Dancing References Further Reading

A masterpiece of contemporary Canadian fiction, Craig Davidson's The Saturday Night Ghost Club (2018) is a masterfully crafted coming-of-age story that deals with various issues ranging from love to personal loss. This paper aims to analyse the novel's Gothic undertones and the symbolic significance of the textual ghosts in depicting individual trauma, arguing that ghosts, as liminal concepts, are not only embodiments of trauma, but also effective means of understanding the self and healing. Drawing on ideas from narratology and psychology, the article also focuses on the complex interplay between storytelling and memory.

This book explores the Gothic tradition in Canadian literature by tracing a distinctive reworking of the British Gothic in Canada. It traces the ways the Gothic genre was reinvented for a specifically Canadian context. On the one hand, Canadian writers expressed anxiety about the applicability of the British Gothic tradition to the colonies; on the other, they turned to the Gothic for its vitalising rather than unsettling potential. After charting this history of Gothic infusion, Canadian Gothic turns its attention to the body of Aboriginal and diasporic writings that respond to this discourse of national self-invention from a post-colonial perspective. These counter-narratives unsettle the naturalising force of this invented history, rendering the sense of Gothic comfort newly strange. The Canadian Gothic tradition has thus been a conflicted one, which reimagines the Gothic as a form of cultural sustenance. This volume offers an important reconsideration of the Gothic legacy in Canada.

Taking as its point of departure recent insights about the performative nature of genre, The Poetics and Politics of the American Gothic challenges the critical tendency to accept at face value that gothic literature is mainly about fear. Instead, Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet argues that the American Gothic, and gothic literature in general, is also about judgment: how to judge and what happens when judgment is confronted with situations that defy its limits. Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, Gilman, and James all shared a concern with the political and ideological debates of their time, but tended to approach these debates indirectly. Thus, Monnet suggests, while slavery and race are not the explicit subject matter of antebellum works by Poe and Hawthorne, they nevertheless permeate it through suggestive analogies and tacit references. Similarly, Melville, Gilman, and James use the gothic to explore the categories of gender and sexuality that were being renegotiated during the latter half of the century. Focusing on \"The Fall of the House of Usher,\" The Marble Faun, Pierre, The Turn of the Screw, and \"The Yellow Wallpaper,\" Monnet brings to bear minor texts by the same authors that further enrich her innovative readings of these canonical works. At the same time, her study persuasively argues that the Gothic's endurance and ubiquity are in large part related to its being uniquely adapted to rehearse questions about judgment and justice that continue to fascinate and disturb. Contents: Introduction; Unreliable narrators and 'unnatural sensations': irony and conscience in Edgar Allan Poe; 'Everywhere ... a cross - and nastiness at the foot of it': history, ethics, and slavery in Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Marble Faun; 'Thy catching nobleness unsexes me, my brother': queer knowledge in Herman Melville's Pierre; 'I was queer company enough - quite as queer as the company I received': the queer Gothic of Henry James and Charlotte Perkins Gilman; Bibliography; Index. Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet is Assistant Professor of American Literature at the University of Lausanne, Switzerland.