ABSTRACT

For over two hundred years, the Gothic has remained fixed in the European and American imaginations, steadily securing its position as a global cultural mode in recent decades. The globalization of Gothic studies has resulted in the proliferation of new critical concepts and a growing academic interest in the genre. Yet, despite its longevity, unprecedented expansion, and accusations of prescriptiveness, the Gothic remains elusive and without a straightforward definition. Gothic Peregrinations: The Unexplored and Re-explored Territories looks at Gothic productions largely marginalized in the studies of the genre, including the European absorption of and response to the Gothic. This collection of essays identifies landmarks and ley lines in the insufficiently probed territories of Gothic scholarship and sets out to explore its unmapped regions.

This volume not only examines Gothic peregrinations from a geographical perspective but also investigates how the genre has been at odds with strict demarcation of generic boundaries. Analyzing texts which come from outside the Gothic canon, yet prove to be deeply indebted to it, like bereavement memoirs, stories produced by and about factory girls of Massachusetts, and the Mattel Monster High franchise, this volume illuminates the previously unexplored fields in Gothic studies. The chapters in this volume reveal the truly transnational expansion of the Gothic and the importance of exchange – exchange now seen not only as crucial to the genre’s gestation, or vital to the processes of globalization, but also to legitimizing Gothic studies in the global world.

chapter |16 pages

Introduction

part I|62 pages

The Gothic Mystique

chapter 1|21 pages

“A Romance Fit for the Taste of Our Era”

Anna Mostowska and the First Polish Gothic Stories

chapter 2|17 pages

Under the Sign of Gothic

The Goddess Kālī from Mahābhārata to Marguerite Yourcenar’s “Kali Beheaded”

chapter 4|12 pages

“A Play of Fear and Laughter”

Gothic Excesses in A.S. Byatt’s Possession

part III|35 pages

Little Ones Love to Be Afraid

chapter 7|13 pages

From Puppet to ‘Real’ Boy

Pinocchio Transformed

chapter 8|22 pages

Gothic, Commodities, and Culture

The Monster High Franchise

part IV|50 pages

Gothic Spaces

chapter 9|20 pages

Disturbing “the Sleep of Substance”

Nabokov’s and Millhauser’s Infinite Museums

chapter 10|17 pages

Fright Factories

Nineteenth-Century Industrial Gothic

chapter 11|13 pages

A Criminal Intrigue in a Gothic Scenery

Castle Skull by John Dickson Carr

part V|27 pages

Gothic Monstrosities

chapter 12|13 pages

Monstrous Educators

The Wendol of Michael Crichton’s Eaters of the Dead

part VI|41 pages

Transgressing Boundaries and Crossing Borders

chapter 15|13 pages

Life, Politics, Science, and Art

Poe’s “The Raven” and Its Reinterpretations by Sastre, Witkiewicz, and Pleijel

chapter 16|14 pages

Stranger than Fiction

Gothic Themes in Bereavement Memoirs of Spousal Loss