Items related to American Gothic: An Anthology 1787–1916 (Blackwell...
Synopsis
This collection brings together, and sets into dialogue, Gothic works by a number of authors, men and women, black and white, which illuminate many of the deepest concerns and fears of nineteenth–century America.
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From the Back Cover
This anthology fills a need which is long–standing but only recently recognized. Textbooks have generally ignored Leslie Fiedler′s perception, of nearly forty years ago, that most of the powerful and innovative works of American literature have always been within the Gothic mode. This collection brings together, and sets into dialogue, Gothic works by a number of authors, men and women, black and white, which illuminate many of the deepest concerns and fears of nineteenth–century America.
Among the themes in this conversation are the horror at illness and bodily decay, in an age with many incurable infectious diseases; the mutual mistrust of men and women, as gender roles shifted radically; the relationship of humans and machines; the horror that may lurk within outwardly normal families; and, inescapably, the tragedy of race relations in America. In this journey through nineteenth–century shadows, present–day readers should not be surprised to find uncomfortable and challenging parallels with the present.
The collection contains short stories, novellas, and poems by some of America′s best–known authors (Cooper, Hawthorne, Melville, Dickinson, Mark Twain), and others who are obscure or recently rediscovered, e.g. John Neal, Henry Clay Lewis, Alice Cary, Lafcadio Hearn. Writers long associated with the uncanny or supernatural appear, such as Charles Brockden Brown, Edgar Allen Poe, and Ambrose Bierce, as well as authors usually not placed within this tradition (Stephen Crane, Sarah Orne Jewett, and Frank Norris, for example). There is a strong representation of female Gothic, and African–American writers such as Charles Chesnutt who brilliantly anticipate the Gothic fiction of race in our own time.
About the Author
Charles L. Crow if Professor Emeritus of English at Bowling Green State University in Ohio. He is co–editor of The Haunted Dusk: American Supernatural Fiction, 1820–1920 and of The Occult in America: New Historical Perspectives, and author of numerous articles on such nineteenth–century and early twentieth–century American authors as Howells, Clemens, Norris, London and Cather. He is past–president of the Frank Norris Society and is a founding member of the International Gothic Association.
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- PublisherWiley–Blackwell
- Publication date1999
- ISBN 10 0631206515
- ISBN 13 9780631206514
- BindingHardcover
- Number of pages496
- EditorCrow Charles L.
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