Savage Horrors: The Intrinsic Raciality of the American Gothic

Description

The American Gothic novel has been deeply shaped by issues of race and raciality from its origins in British Romanticism to the American Gothic novel in the twenty-first century. Savage Horrors delineates an intrinsic raciality that is discursively sedimented in the Gothic's uniquely binary structure. Corinna Lenhardt uncovers the destructive and lasting impact of the Gothic's anti-Black racism on the cultural discourses in the United States. At the same time, Savage Horrors traces the unflinching Black resistance back to the Gothic's intrinsic raciality. The African American Gothic, however, does not originate there but in the Black Atlantic – roughly a decade before the first Gothic novel was ever written on American soil. Cover Contents Acknowledgments Abbreviations Introduction PART I:The Gothic and the Savage Villain/Civil Hero Gotheme What Is the Gothic? 1.1 The “Goth” in Gothic 1.2 A Working Definition 1.3 A Savage Villain/Civil Hero Gotheme? British Origins of the Savage Villain/ Civil Hero Gotheme 2.1 The Villain 2.2 The Damsel in Distress 2.3 The Hero 2.4 Gothic Nationalism, or, the Gothic Gothic PART II:The Savage Villain/Civil Hero Gotheme: WASP Origins and Iterations Early WASP American Adaptations 3.1 Mock(ing) Villainy 3.2 Savage Villainy Contemporary WASP American Iterations 4.1 Spotlights: The WASP American Gothic Novel Today 4.2 Shirley Temple, Sidney Poitier, and the Africanist Savage Villain Walk into the Woods…: Stephen King’s The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon 4.3 “Monster: Half Woman and Half Invention”—Karen Russell’s Swamplandia! 4.4 Gothic Continuities and a Necessary Intervention (Interim Results) PART III:“You say I am wilderness. I am”—Black Origins and African American Reiterations Innovation and Resistance: The SV/CH Gotheme in Black Writing, 1789 to 1861 5.1 The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African, Written by Himself 5.2 Gothic/Slavery: African American Slave Narratives 5.3 Early African American Novels: Clotel and The Bondwoman’s Narrative African American Gothic Today: Black Tradition and Reiterative Practices 6.1 Spotlights: The African American Gothic Novel Today 6.2 “Are You Afraid? You Should Be”: Tony Morrison’s A Mercy 6.3 “Pheenie Optimism”—with Zombies!: Colson Whitehead’s Zone One Epilogue: The American Gothic, Raciality, and the Possibility of Reiterative “Unthought” Works Cited