Gothic America – Narrative, History & Nation: Narrative, History and Nation - Hardcover

Goddu, Teresa A

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0231108168 ISBN 13: 9780231108164

Publisher: Columbia University Press, 1997

Synopsis

The gothic novel - the literary stronghold of ghosts, family curses, imperiled heroines and cumbersome plots - might be thought to fall under the category of "escapist fiction". However, in this reappraisal Teresa Goddu demonstrates that the American Gothic novel, was, in often suprising ways, actively engaged with social, political and cultural concerns of its time. Although social dislocations such as slavery or the massacre of Native Americans were repressed by the national consciouness, Goddu points out that these subjects were incorporated by the gothic novel, articulated into an enduring national identity. Focusing on literature between the Revolutionary and Civil Wars, this work traces the development of the genre as a whole and of several subgenres - the female gothic, the Southern gothic and the African-American gothic. Among the works examined are Poe's "Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym", Hawthorn's "The House of the Seven Gables", Alcott's ghost stories, and Jacob's "Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl". It is, finally, the African-American gothic, Goddu argues, that illuminates most clearly the link between frightening literature and a horror-filled social reality. Questioning basic assumptions about America's identity, this text is a fresh examination of a genre of American literature and the complex historical circumstance that produced it.

About this title

Review:

Argues that the claustrophobic horrors of Gothic literature are not private, but arise where concrete experience contradicts the dream world of social myth. This brilliant interpretation of the Gothic treats the nightmares that emerge when the reality of racial oppression disrupts the vision of America as a land of freedom.

About the Author:

Teresa A. Goddu is assistant professor of English at Vanderbilt University, where she was a fellow of the Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities.

About this edition

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Publication date: 1997
• ISBN 10: 0231108168
• ISBN 13: 9780231108164
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 238