ABSTRACT
Offering a variety of critical approaches to late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Gothic literature, this collection provides a transnational view of the emergence and flowering of the Gothic. The essays expand on now well-known approaches to the Gothic (such as those that concentrate exclusively on race, gender, or nation) by focusing on international issues: religious traditions, social reform, economic and financial pitfalls, manifest destiny and expansion, changing concepts of nationhood, and destabilizing moments of empire-building. By examining a wide array of Gothic texts, including novels, drama, and poetry, the contributors present the Gothic not as a peripheral, marginal genre, but as a central mode of literary exchange in an ever-expanding global context. Thus the traditional conventions of the Gothic, such as those associated with Ann Radcliffe and Monk Lewis, are read alongside unexpected Gothic formulations and lesser-known Gothic authors and texts. These include Mary Rowlandson and Bram Stoker, Frances and Anthony Trollope, Louisa May Alcott, Elizabeth Gaskell, Theodore Dreiser, Rudyard Kipling, and Lafcadio Hearn, as well as the actors Edmund Kean and George Frederick Cooke. Individually and collectively, the essays provide a much-needed perspective that eschews national borders in order to explore the central role that global (and particularly transatlantic) exchange played in the development of the Gothic. British, American, Continental, Caribbean, and Asian Gothic are represented in this collection, which seeks to deepen our understanding of the Gothic as not merely a national but a global aesthetic.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
part 1|64 pages
Old World Gothic and the New World Frontier
chapter Chapter 2|14 pages
Transcultural Gothic: Isaac Mitchell's Alonzo and Melissa as an Early Example of Popular Culture
chapter Chapter 4|12 pages
Frontier Bloodlust in England: American Captivity Narratives and Stoker's Dracula
part 2|56 pages
Gothic Catholicism
chapter Chapter 5|14 pages
Demonizing the Catholic Other: Religion and the Secularization Process in Gothic Literature
chapter Chapter 6|16 pages
A Woman with a Cross: The Transgressive, Transnational Nun in Anti-Catholic Fiction
part 3|50 pages
Anglo-American Genre Exchanges: Beyond the Novel
part 4|68 pages
Social Anxieties and Hauntings