EcoGothic

by Andrew Smith (Editor), William Hughes (Editor)

This book will provide the first study of how the Gothic engages with ecocritical ideas. Ecocriticism has frequently explored images of environmental catastrophe, the wilderness, the idea of home, constructions of 'nature', and images of the post-apocalypse – images which are also central to a certain type of Gothic literature. By exploring the relationship between the ecocritical aspects of the Gothic and the Gothic elements of the ecocritical, this book provides a new way of looking at both the Gothic and ecocriticism. Writers discussed include Ann Radcliffe, Mary Shelley, Ambrose Bierce, Algernon Blackwood, Margaret Atwood, Cormac McCarthy, Dan Simmons and Rana Dasgupta. The volume thus explores writing and film across various national contexts including Britain, America and Canada, as well as giving due consideration to how such issues might be discussed within a global context.

Genres: Nonfiction, Ecology, Gothic

224 pages, Hardcover

First published September 17, 2013

About the author

Professor of English Studies, Head of English and Modern Languages and Co-Director of the Research Centre for Literature, Arts, and Science at the University of Glamorgan.

"My research interests are in Gothic literature, literature and science, nineteenth century literature, and critical theory. I have published widely in these areas and have given conference papers on related topics in the UK and in North America, Canada, Spain, France, Sweden, Germany and the Netherlands. In 2007 I delivered a keynote address at the International Gothic Association conference held in Aix-en-Provence. I was elected Joint President of the International Gothic Association in 2009 and re-elected in 2011. I was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts in 2007 and elected a Fellow of the English Association in 2008."

Reviews

[Maxwell · Rating 4 out of 5]

I find most nature writing unbearable. Luckily the last couple decades of ecology have buried the dewey hippy-politics beneath its own stupid oak trees. Ecocriticism more often deals with the moss-eaten sublime of derelict industrial marvels, mountains of garbage and animals irradiated into teratological nightmares. About time someone explicitly tied it to the gothic.

At its best, I think, Ecocriticism is not just another swivel-eyed warning about our incipient climate doomsday. Tree-hugging guilt over our civilizational hubris is actually less useful than the acceleration of the ideas-above-our-station which got us here in the first place--I think everyone basically expects that the penthouse-peaks of our skyscrapers will be bobbing in torrid seawater within a generation or two. Through this morbid logic of catastrophe we can rethink the broiling topology of the earth as Montoni’s castle or Ambrosio’s abbey, a cloistered hothouse which induces terror, perversity and a feverish mania for escape.

Incidentally, I think that this conception of fungal networks across a Spinozist gaia which depriveleges the intelligence and interiority of the human subject recreates some of the dramas it was conceived to supplant. I have a lot of friends doing research projects in ecocriticism (including my to-be PhD supervisor who edited this book) which basically use this tack, and I don’t want to undermine or dismiss their work, but one thing that strikes me about making (mostly 19th century) gothic texts backwards-compatible with 21st century anthropocene eschatology is how they recapitulate the same narratological patterns. If you plug these machines into one another, they their motors run in perfect unison.

I don’t want to make dramatic claims about universal structures, which are lame and stupid and wrong, but I think it’s interesting that Frankenstein, Algernon Blackwood and The Wicker Man can be extrapolated to this current moment posthuman ecology without losing a lurching step; think of it as the vertical folds of time layering a gothic materialism, a runaway feedback process crash landing back into the system from which it originated and governing it through an anomalous time-loop. It’s a milieu--not a map.

I’ve forgotten to discuss the content or quality of the essays contained here. They’re all good.

[PRJ Greenwell · Rating 4 out of 5]

At first glance, this book looks set to examine a rather novel concept: Gothic fiction filtered through ecocriticism and environmental awareness. Some of the chapters do deal with this quite well, but others are mere book or film reviews, glossing over their subjects with parenthetical mentions. The early sections of this book are the best, where a link between canonical Gothic (i.e the works of Radcliffe, Lewis, et al) and a stark awareness of the natural environment is ably demonstrated. It's here that this book offers an eye-opening exercise in broadening one's literary horizons.

The book runs out of steam as it progresses, with later chapters devoting their energies to subjects like the films The Happening and 2012, among other things.

Still, the whole thing is recommended for serious students of the Gothic and it's worth a place on your shelf.

[Ro Prufrock · Rating 5 out of 5]

wonderful anthology, there wasn't an essay in it which did not give me some food for thought