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Contemporary ecocriticism and the American Gothic tradition share an investment in the psychic repression of terrors lurking just beyond the articulable. Amitav Ghosh's assertion that the history of fossil fuels is ‘a matter of embarrassment verging on the unspeakable’ and Timothy Morton's conception of ecocatastrophe as ‘an uncanny entity that we cannot grasp’ both, for instance, invoke the Gothic's most infamous conventions—the unrepresentable, the dark, shrouded, and looming—within the framework of contemporary environmental discourse. However, the nature of the Gothic reminds us that repression and disavowal tend only to strengthen the buried object, not to extinguish it. Turning to this centuries‐old tradition for epistemological direction, might contemporary literary critics solve climate change's ‘crisis of representation’ by refusing to privilege direct representation altogether? This paper traces the fusion of ecocritical and Gothic discourse to the early nineteenth century, taking as its primary object Poe's only published novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1838). I argue that Poe deploys Gothic conventions throughout the novel to obliquely represent ‘Unspeakable’ environmental anxieties emerging around extractivism, plantation agriculture, overconsumption, global trade networks, and ecological apocalypse. After illuminating the explicitly ecological dimensions of Poe's Gothic fiction, I demonstrate how conventional Gothic tropes—including metaphor, latency, secrecy, containment, darkness, decay, and ‘the Unspeakable’ in its broadest sense—can inform contemporary literary‐critical approaches to climate change, which (according to Ghosh, Morton, and contemporaries) often assume that the narrative latency of ecocatastrophe inherently precludes our recognition of environmental crisis. In Poe's Gothic fiction, however, ‘Unspeakable’ horrors and latent anxieties are eventually made even more blatantly manifest than they would be if they were represented mimetically.

In the article I discuss Nathaniel Hawthorne’s ecological imagination as problematized in his lesser-known short story “The Snow-Image: A Childish Miracle” (1849). Although Hawthorne wrote the story for children, it carries a darker gothic undertone, illustrating the problematic aspect of the Romantic nature/culture division. The focus of my inquiry are the potential ecological implications. The analytical framework is taken from Andrew Smith and William Hughes’ edited collection Ecogothic (2013), in which several scholars work towards a definition of an environmentally conscious variety of the gothic genre. Using some of their findings and concepts along with selected ecocritical and New Materialist theories, I interrogate Hawthorne’s highly ambiguous and shifting tropes of nature which reveal the correlation between the crisis of the imagination and that of the environment. I argue that the central trope of the snow-child and the trajectory of the narrative conceal a Frankensteinesque subplot employed to critically rethink nature as a transcendental experience.

This article is an ecocritical reading of the Swedish television series Jordskott. I discuss the effects in the series produced by the combination of the Nordic Noir's style and narrative techniques with elements of other genres, especially Gothic horror. I argue that through the contemporary reworking of the centuries-old Nordic mythology, Jordskott demonstrates how the aggressive powers of nature in Gothic narratives can no more be conventionally explained by referring to the pagan, pre-Christian beliefs, but need to be reconceived in light of the relentless environmental devastation brought about by humankind. The link unveiled between natural ecology and cultural mythology allows the series to surpass the limitations of the regionally informed folkloric story and to evolve into an ecological cautionary tale of global significance.

With the rise of ecocriticism and environmental studies, a proliferation of research has surfaced addressing the myriad implications of the environmental crisis, ranging from the imperative for conservation to the impacts of environmental degradation on human life. In this context, ecogothic has emerged as a novel genre, presenting nature as a malevolent force that disrupts human tranquility. Ecogothic narratives foster an intricate relationship between the human and the non-human world. This paper aims to explore the effect of the physical environment on the human psyche and character formation, specifically in Krasznahorkai’s Sátántangó. The novel alludes to Hungary’s disastrous foray into enforced agricultural collectivism, and it conveys the brutal physical conditions of rural Hungary, where the land is incessantly battered by rain. This, in turn, becomes a potent symbol for the repressive political regime of the era. Sátántangó’s depiction of a haunted landscape, domineering male characters, and subjugated women contributes to its Gothic attributes. The narrative’s transgressive male figures and the decaying estate illuminate the exploitation of the land, while the portrayal of Gothic female characters symbolizes nature’s retaliation against the depredations inflicted by the inhabitants.

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 is an ecocritical reading of the Swedish television series . I discuss the effects in the series produced by the combination of the Nordic Noir's style and narrative techniques with elements of other genres, especially Gothic horror. I argue that through the contemporary reworking of the centuries-old Nordic mythology, demonstrates how the aggressive powers of nature in Gothic narratives can no more be conventionally explained by referring to the pagan, pre-Christian beliefs, but need to be reconceived in light of the relentless environmental devastation brought about by humankind. The link unveiled between natural ecology and cultural mythology allows the series to surpass the limitations of the regionally informed folkloric story and to evolve into an ecological cautionary tale of global significance.

In this article, I seek to present a “metaphorology” of the shipwreck through a literary example. As Hans Blumenberg has noted, the shipwreck has served as a metaphor for the contingency of human existence in Western culture. Building on Blumenberg’s ideas, I argue that modernity heightens contingency and destroys the possibility of a coherent, anthropocentric discourse. For Quentin Meillassoux, the modern outlook exposes the contingency and inhumanity of reality. Building on Meillassoux and Blumenberg’s work, I address ideas pertaining to contingency and the metaphor of modernity-as-shipwreck by engaging with Dan Simmons’ historical novel, (2007), based on events surrounding the failed Franklin Expedition of 1845-48. The sinister, frozen wastelands of the Arctic figure as the limit of both European humanity and rationality. In Simmons’ novel, the traumatic encounter with cultural otherness conjures up visions of an implosion of colonial ambitions, as the crew members are gradually consumed by both the harsh environment and the ancient Inuit ice demon and must confront the indifferent frozen wastes of a mythological, gothic North. Simmons’ gothic North Pole constitutes an example of “extro-science fiction,” situated beyond the limits of all knowledge.

The focus of my inquiry are environmentally inflected metaphors and discourses of toxicity which inform the contemporary North American posthuman lyric. This provisional generic category of the posthuman lyric has been inspired by the recent shift from an anthropocentric understanding of lyric subjectivities to a biocentric perspective which repositions human epistemologies in relation to more-than-human matter. The posthuman angle questions the concept of the sovereign human self, stressing transversal ontologies, open to inter-agential exchanges, diverse biosemiotic processes and communication loops. My primary interest is in poetic representations of the human body as a transversal, toxic, catastrophe- and death-haunted wasteland. The volumes chosen to problematize those processes are Allison Cobb’s After We All Died (2016), an elegiac meditation on the dying human species and anthropogenic change, and Adam Dickinson’s Anatomic (2018), which probes the leaky perimeters of the chemical self using an electronic microscope and burden tests of the poet’s own bodily tissues. The posthumanist angle which informs the analyses is supplemented with an ecoGothic one, as both critical paradigms can be seen as interrogatory discourses which probe human fears and hopes concerning the “edge of the human” and the recognition of non-human agency. Within the ecoGothic framework, nature is seen as “a contested site”—a “space of crisis,” where human and non-human ecologies interact and co-produce meaning. This double lens will be used for the study of posthuman imaginaries and Anthropocene affects employed by Dickinson and Cobb.

N.K. Jemisin’s critically acclaimed Broken Earth trilogy examines life in a post-apocalyptic alternate universe after a planet is cracked, bleeding and about to die. The trilogy does not seek to redeem the earth or a fractured environment. Rather, the novels demonstrate the ways in which characters develop, dissolve and mutually destroy or support each other. Jemisin’s conception of nature is unique and almost antithetical to human survival, but the roots of this destruction go deep. The fractured economies and governments within this post-apocalyptic universe paint a haunting picture of a world whose geopolitics are affected by the nature it has despoiled and disintegrated. The trilogy is a fitting fable for a planet in which climate change has affected endangered species, ecosystems and world economics. I apply a postcolonial ecoGothic lens to the analysis of the Broken Earth trilogy. This postcolonial ecoGothic approach will be married to a consideration of Jason C Moore’s unveiling of the Capitolocene through the lens of Donna Haraway’s and Anna Tsing’s positioning of a Plantationocene to look at patterns of power and domination. This paper is particularly concerned with the ways in which these patterns are related to the condition of societies living under siege and the ways in which these societies mimic patterns of colonial domination. The proposed outcome of this analysis will be to strip the layers of the Broken Earth trilogy to unearth what the narrative reveals about the environmental travails and geopolitical dissolutions that haunt our existences in what has been dubbed the Anthropocene.