Abstract
‘Ecocriticism and the Genre’ explores a recent and topical development in Gothic scholarship, the ecogothic. Gothic literature often exhibits a fascination with sublime, terrifying, and horrifying aspects of the natural world, its creatures, plants, and landscapes, while ecocriticism, particularly in the face of current urgent ecological problems, often turns to Gothic tropes and ways of thinking to theorise human relationships (both the good and the bad) with the more-than-human world. This chapter outlines origins and definitions of ecogothic, discusses relationships between the Gothic and ecocriticism, and includes three case studies, on Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), Megan Hunter’s The End We Start From (2017), and the YA Gothic of David Almond.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
Bibliography
Bennett, Jane, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham and London, Duke University Press, 2010).
Blum, Hester, ‘John Cleves Symmes and the Planetary Reach of Polar Exploration’, American Literature 84, no. 2 (2012): 243–71.
Bondar, Alanna F., ‘Bodies on Earth: Exploring Sites of the Canadian Ecogothic’, in EcoGothic, eds. Smith and Hughes (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2013), 72–86.
Byrne, Eleanor, ‘Ecogothic Dislocations in Hanya Yanagihara’s The People in the Trees’, Interventions 19, no. 7 (2017): 962–75.
Del Principe, David, ‘The Ecogothic in the Long Nineteenth Century’, Gothic Studies 16, no. 1 (2014): 1–8.
Estok, Simon C., ‘Theorizing in a Space of Ambivalent Openness: Ecocriticism and Ecophobia’, Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 16, no. 2 (2009): 203–25.
———, ‘Ecomedia and Ecophobia’, Neohelicon 43, no. 1 (2016): 127–45.
Ganz, Shoshannah, ‘Margaret Atwood’s Monsters in the Canadian Ecogothic’, in EcoGothic, eds. Smith and Hughes (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2013), 87–102.
Garrard, Greg, ‘Environment’, in The Encyclopedia of the Gothic, eds. William Hughes, David Punter, and Andrew Smith (Wiley-Blackwell, 2012).
Haraway, Donna, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham and London, Duke University Press, 2016).
Hillard, Tom J., ‘“Deep into That Darkness Peering”: An Essay on Gothic Nature’, Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 16, no. 4 (2009): 685–95.
———, ‘From Salem Witch to Blair Witch: The Puritan Influence on American Gothic Nature’, in EcoGothic, eds. Smith and Hughes (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2013), 103–19.
Hitt, Christopher, ‘Towards an Ecological Sublime’, New Literary History 30, no. 3 (1999): 603–23.
Hogle, Jerrold E., ‘Introduction: The Gothic in Western Culture’, in The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction, ed. Jerrold E. Hogle (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2002), 1–20.
Hughes, William, ‘“A Strange Kind of Evil”: Superficial Paganism and False Ecology in the Wicker Man’, in EcoGothic, eds. Smith and Hughes, 58–71.
Kröger, Lisa, ‘Panic, Paranoia and Pathos: Ecocriticism in the Eighteenth-Century Gothic Novel’, in EcoGothic, eds. Smith and Hughes (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2013), 15–27.
Lanone, Catherine, ‘Monsters on the Ice and Global Warming: From Mary Shelley and Sir John Franklin to Margaret Atwood and Dan Simmons’, in EcoGothic, eds. Smith and Hughes (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2013), 28–43.
Latour, Bruno, Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies (Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1999).
Morton, Timothy, Ecology Without Nature (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2007).
———, The Ecological Thought (Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 2010).
Plumwood, Val, ‘Decolonizing Nature: Strategies for Conservation in a Post-colonial Era’, in Decolonizing Relationships with Nature, eds. William M. Adams and Martin Mulligan (London, Earthscan, 2003), 51–78.
———, ‘Shadow Places and the Politics of Dwelling’, Australian Humanities Review 44 (2008): n.p.
Richard, Jessica, ‘“A Paradise of My Own Creation”: Frankenstein and the Improbable Romance of Polar Exploration’, Nineteenth-Century Contexts 25, no. 4 (2003): 295–314.
Rozelle, Lee, Ecosublime: Environmental Awe and Terror from New World to Oddworld (Tuscaloosa, University of Alabama Press, 2006).
Scharper, Hilary, ‘The Ecogothic’ (c. 2018): n.p., https://perditanovel.com/the-eco-gothic-2/, Accessed 22 January 2019.
Schell, Jennifer, ‘The Annihilation of Self and Species: The Ecogothic Sensibilities of Mary Shelley and Nathaniel Hawthorne’, in The Gothic and Death, ed. Carol Margaret Davison (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2017).
Shelley, Mary, Frankenstein (New York and London, W. W. Norton, 1996).
Smith, Andrew, and William Hughes, eds., EcoGothic (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2013).
Soper, Kate, ‘Unnatural Times? The Social Imaginary and the Future of Nature’, The Sociological Review 57, no. 2 (2009): 222–35.
Spooner, Catherine, Post-Millennial Gothic: Comedy, Romance and the Rise of Happy Gothic (London, Bloomsbury, 2017).
Squire, Louise, ‘“I Am Not Afraid to Die”: Contemporary Environmental Crisis Fiction and the Post-theory Era’, in Extending Ecocriticism: Crisis, Collaboration and Challenges in the Environmental Humanities, eds. Peter Barry and William Welstead (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2017), 14–29.
Unwin, Lucy, ‘Q&A with Megan Hunter About The End We Start From’, https://shinynewbooks.co.uk/qa-with-megan-hunter-about-the-end-we-start-from/, Accessed 31 January 2019.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2020 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Alder, E., Bavidge, J. (2020). Ecocriticism and the Genre. In: Bloom, C. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Contemporary Gothic. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33136-8_14
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33136-8_14
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-33135-1
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-33136-8
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)