ABSTRACT

This introduction tracks the emergence of the ecogothic as a critical concept and offers a definition of the ecogothic. It then gives short readings of exemplary American ecogothic texts, exploring the intermingling of racial oppression and environment in Crèvecoeur’s 1782 Letters from an American Farmer and Henry Clay Lewis’s 1850 story “A Struggle for Life” as well as the enmeshment of the human and the nonhuman in Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.’s 1861 novel Elsie Venner.