Overview
- Studies American women writers whose views of hauntings connect to their image of an internal domestic landscape
- Examines how the collision between the local and national can lead to the Gothic protagonist’s sense of belonging or alienation
- Addresses regions in the US that have their own specific versions of the Gothic including the South, New England, the West Coast, and the Midwest
Part of the book series: Palgrave Gothic (PAGO)
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About this book
American Women’s Regionalist Fiction: Mapping the Gothic seeks to redress the monolithic vision of American Gothic by analyzing the various sectional or regional attempts to Gothicize what is most claustrophobic or peculiar about local history. Since women writers were often relegated to inferior status, it is especially compelling to look at women from the Gothic perspective. The regionalist Gothic develops along the line of difference and not unity—thus emphasizing regional peculiarities or a sense of superiority in terms of regional history, natural landscapes, immigrant customs, folk tales, or idiosyncratic ways. The essays study the uncanny or the haunting quality of “the commonplace,” as Hawthorne would have it in his introduction to The House of the Seven Gables, in regionalist Gothic fiction by a wide range of women writers between ca. 1850 and 1930. This collection seeks to examine how/if the regionalist perspective is small, limited, and stultifying and leads to Gothic moments, or whether the intersection between local and national leads to a clash that is jarring and Gothic in nature.
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Keywords
Table of contents (19 chapters)
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New England Gothic: Resisting Nation
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New England’s Landscapes and the Ecogothic
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Southern Gothic: Superstition, Race, Folklore
Reviews
Editors and Affiliations
About the editors
Monika Elbert is Professor of English and a Distinguished University Scholar at Montclair State University, USA. She is editor of the Nathaniel Hawthorne Review and her recent publications include: Hawthorne in Context (2018) and, co-edited with Wendy Ryden, Haunting Realities: Naturalist Gothic and American Realism (2017).
Rita Bode is Professor of English Literature at Trent University, Canada. Her co-edited collections include L.M. Montgomery and the Matter of Nature(s) (2018) and L.M. Montgomery’s Rainbow Valleys: The Ontario Years, 1911-1942 (2015).
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: American Women's Regionalist Fiction
Book Subtitle: Mapping the Gothic
Editors: Monika Elbert, Rita Bode
Series Title: Palgrave Gothic
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55552-8
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media Studies, Literature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-030-55551-1Published: 05 January 2021
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-030-55554-2Published: 06 January 2022
eBook ISBN: 978-3-030-55552-8Published: 04 January 2021
Series ISSN: 2634-6214
Series E-ISSN: 2634-6222
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XIII, 372
Number of Illustrations: 2 b/w illustrations
Topics: Gothic Fiction, North American Literature, Culture and Gender, History of the Book, American Culture