EcoGothic

Description

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. Cover EcoGothic Contents Acknowledgements Notes on contributors 1 Introduction: defining the ecoGothic 2 Panic, paranoia and pathos: ecocriticism in the eighteenth-century Gothic novel 3 Monsters on the ice and global warming: from Mary Shelley and Sir John Franklin to Margaret Atwood and Dan Simmons 4 Algernon Blackwood: nature and spirit 5 ‘A strange kind of evil’: superficial paganism and false ecology in The Wicker Man 6 Bodies on earth: exploring sites of the Canadian ecoGothic 7 Margaret Atwood’s monsters in the Canadian ecoGothic 8 From Salem witch to Blair Witch: the Puritan influence on American Gothic nature 9 ‘The blank darkness outside’: Ambrose Bierce and wilderness Gothic at the end of the frontier 10 Locating the self in the post-apocalypse: the American Gothic journeys of Jack Kerouac, Cormac McCarthy and Jim Crace 11 A Gothic apocalypse: encountering the monstrous in American cinema 12 The riddle was the angel in the house: towards an American ecofeminist Gothic 13 ‘Uncanny states’: global ecoGothic and the world-ecology in Rana Dasgupta’s Tokyo Cancelled Index