The Cambridge Companion To American Gothic

This Companion offers a thorough overview of the diversity of the American Gothic tradition from its origins to the present.

Gothic as a form of fiction-making has played a major role in Western culture since the late eighteenth century. Here fourteen world-class experts on the Gothic provide thorough and revealing accounts of this haunting-to-horrifying type of fiction from the 1760s (the decade of The Castle of Otranto, the first so-called Gothic story ) to the end of the twentieth century (an era haunted by filmed and computerized Gothic simulations). Along the way, these essays explore the connections of Gothic fictions to political and industrial revolutions, the realistic novel, the theatre, Romantic and post-Romantic poetry, nationalism and racism from Europe to America, colonized and post-colonial populations, the rise of film and other visual technologies, the struggles between high and popular culture, changing psychological attitudes towards human identity, gender and sexuality, and the obscure lines between life and death, sanity and madness. The volume also includes a chronology and guides to further reading.

This volume offers a rigorous yet accessible overview of the key questions and intersectional approaches pertaining to American literature and the body. The chapters have been written in an accessible style, making them useful for undergraduates as well as for more experienced researchers.

This Companion explores the Gothic across literature, film, television, and cyberspace, revealing how it has proliferated since 1900 as an expression of modernity. Essays examine the role of Gothic in major struggles of modern life over sex and gender, the intermixing of different cultures, and the very nature of modernity.

A Companion to American Gothic features a collection of original essays that explore America’s gothic literary tradition. The largest collection of essays in the field of American Gothic Contributions from a wide variety of scholars from around the world The most complete coverage of theory, major authors, popular culture and non-print media available

Taking Horror seriously, the book surveys America's bloody and haunted history through its most terrifying cultural expressions.

In America as in Britain, the rise of the Gothic represented the other—the fearful shadows cast upon Enlightenment philosophies of common sense, democratic positivism, and optimistic futurity. Many critics have recognized the centrality of these shadows to American culture and self-identification. American Gothic, however, remaps the field by offering a series of revisionist essays associated with a common theme: the range and variety of Gothic manifestations in high and popular art from the roots of American culture to the present. The thirteen essayists approach the persistence of the Gothic in American culture by providing a composite of interventions that focus on specific issues—the histories of gender and race, the cultures of cities and scandals and sensations—in order to advance distinct theoretical paradigms. Each essay sustains a connection between a particular theoretical field and a central problem in the Gothic tradition. Drawing widely on contemporary theory—particularly revisionist views of Freud such as those offered by Lacan and Kristeva—this volume ranges from the well-known Gothic horrors of Edgar Allan Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne to the popular fantasies of Stephen King and the postmodern visions of Kathy Acker. Special attention is paid to the issues of slavery and race in both black and white texts, including those by Ralph Ellison and William Faulkner. In the view of the editors and contributors, the Gothic is not so much a historical category as a mode of thought haunted by history, a part of suburban life and the lifeblood of films such as The Exorcist and Fatal Attraction.

Cormac McCarthy both embodies and redefines the notion of the artist as outsider. His fiction draws on recognizable American themes and employs dense philosophical and theological subtexts, challenging readers by depicting the familiar as inscrutably foreign. The essays in this Companion offer a sophisticated yet concise introduction to McCarthy's difficult and provocative work. The contributors, an international team of McCarthy scholars, analyze some of the most well-known and commonly taught novels - Outer Dark, Blood Meridian, All the Pretty Horses and The Road - while providing detailed treatments of McCarthy's work in cinema, including the many adaptations of his novels to film. Designed for scholars, teachers and general readers, and complete with a chronology and bibliography for further reading, this Companion is an essential reference for anyone interested in gaining a deeper understanding of one of America's most celebrated living novelists.