1st Edition

Ecogothic in Nineteenth-Century American Literature

Edited By Dawn Keetley, Matthew Sivils Copyright 2018
    244 Pages
    by Routledge

    244 Pages
    by Routledge

    First Published in 2017. The first of its kind to address the ecogothic in American literature, this collection of fourteen articles illuminates a new and provocative literacy category, one that exists at the crossroads of the gothic and the environmental imagination, of fear and the ecosystems we inhabit.

    Table of Contents





    Abstracts v





    Introduction: Approaches to the Ecogothic



    Dawn Keetley and Matthew Wynn Sivils 1





    1. "Perverse Nature": Anxieties of Animality and Environment in Charles Brockden Brown’s



    Edgar Huntly



    Tom J. Hillard 33





    2. "A Heap of Ruins": The Horrors of Deforestation in Leonora Sansay’s Secret History



    Lisa M. Vetere 58





    3. "The Earth was Groaning and Shaking": Landscapes of Slavery in The History of Mary Prince



    Amanda Stuckey 80





    4. "Give me my skin": William J. Snelling’s "A Night in the Woods" (1836) and the Gothic



    Accusation against Buffalo Extinction



    Jimmy L. Bryan Jr. 103





    5. Failures to Signify: Poe’s Uncanny Animal Others



    Kate Huber 130





    6. Gothic Materialisms: Experimenting with Fire and Water in Edgar Allan Poe’s Tales of



    (Im)mortality



    Liz Hutter 152





    7. "The Birth-Mark," "Rappaccini’s Daughter," and the Ecogothic





    Lesley Ginsberg 180





    8. Ghoulish Hinterlands: Ecogothic Confrontations in American Slave Narratives





    Jericho Williams 212





    9. Bleeding Feet and Failing Knees: The Ecogothic in Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Chasing Ice



    Cari M. Carpenter 232





    10. Vegetal Haunting: The Gothic Plant in Nineteenth-Century American Fiction



    Matthew Wynn Sivils 253





    11. Ecogothic Extinction Fiction: The Extermination of the Alaskan Mammoth



    Jennifer Schell 275





    12. Hyperobjects and the End of the World: Elemental Antagonists of American Naturalism



    Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock 299





    13. "Two Distinct Worlds"? Maintaining and Transgressing Boundaries of the HumAnimal

    Biography

    Dawn Keetley is Professor of English at Lehigh University, author of Making a Monster: Jesse Pomeroy, the Boy Murderer of 1870s Boston (University of Massachusetts Press, 2017), and co-editor of Plant Horror: Approaches to the Monstrous Vegetal in Fiction and Film (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016).





    Matthew Wynn Sivils is professor of English at Iowa State University and the author of American Environmental Fiction, 1782-1847 (Ashgate/Routledge, 2014).