Following the structure of other titles in the Continuum Introductions to Literary Genres series, American Gothic Fiction includes: A broad definition of the genre and its essential elements. A timeline of developments within the genre. Critical concerns to bear in mind while reading in the genre.

Detailed readings of a range of widely taught texts. In-depth analysis of major themes and issues. Signposts for further study within the genre. A summary of the most important criticism in the field.

A glossary of terms. An annotated, critical reading list.

American Gothic is a painting by Grant Wood in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago. Wood's inspiration came from what is now known as the American Gothic House, and his decision to paint the house along with 'the kind of people I fancied should live in that house.'

This book offers students, writers, and serious fans a window into some of the most popular topics, styles and periods in this subject. Authors studied in American Gothic Fiction include Charles Brockden Brown, William Montgomery Bird, James Fenimore Cooper, Edgar Allan Poe, George Lippard, Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, William Gilmore Simms, John Neal, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Ambrose Bierce, Emma Dawson, W.D. Howells, Henry James, William Faulkner, Anne Rice and William Gibson.

Wester ISBN: 281 Genre: Literary Criticism File Size: 21.74 MB Format: PDF, Docs Download: 318 Read: 239 This new critique of contemporary African-American fiction explores its intersections with and critiques of the Gothic genre. Wester reveals the myriad ways writers manipulate the genre to critique the gothic's traditional racial ideologies and the mechanisms that were appropriated and re-articulated as a useful vehicle for the enunciation of the peculiar terrors and complexities of black existence in America. Re-reading major African American literary texts such as Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, Of One Blood, Cane, Invisible Man, and Corregidora African American Gothic investigates texts from each major era in African American Culture to show how the gothic has consistently circulated throughout the African American literary canon. Category: Literary Criticism. Author: Robert K. Martin ISBN: 023 Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines File Size: 70.24 MB Format: PDF, Docs Download: 961 Read: 1032 In America as in Britain, the rise of the Gothic represented the other—the fearful shadows cast upon Enlightenment philosophies of common sense, democratic positivism, and optimistic futurity.

Many critics have recognized the centrality of these shadows to American culture and self-identification. American Gothic, however, remaps the field by offering a series of revisionist essays associated with a common theme: the range and variety of Gothic manifestations in high and popular art from the roots of American culture to the present. The thirteen essayists approach the persistence of the Gothic in American culture by providing a composite of interventions that focus on specific issues—the histories of gender and race, the cultures of cities and scandals and sensations—in order to advance distinct theoretical paradigms. Each essay sustains a connection between a particular theoretical field and a central problem in the Gothic tradition. Drawing widely on contemporary theory—particularly revisionist views of Freud such as those offered by Lacan and Kristeva—this volume ranges from the well-known Gothic horrors of Edgar Allan Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne to the popular fantasies of Stephen King and the postmodern visions of Kathy Acker. Special attention is paid to the issues of slavery and race in both black and white texts, including those by Ralph Ellison and William Faulkner.

Data2sd Installer X1 Download. In the view of the editors and contributors, the Gothic is not so much a historical category as a mode of thought haunted by history, a part of suburban life and the lifeblood of films such as The Exorcist and Fatal Attraction. Category: Language Arts & Disciplines. Author: Justin D.

Edwards ISBN: Genre: Literary Criticism File Size: 37.50 MB Format: PDF, ePub, Mobi Download: 576 Read: 997 This groundbreaking study analyzes the development of American gothic literature alongside nineteenth-century discourses of passing and racial ambiguity. Family Values Tour 1998 Download Youtube more. By bringing together these areas of analysis, Justin Edwards considers the following questions. How are the categories of “race” and the rhetoric of racial difference tied to the language of gothicism? What can these discursive ties tell us about a range of social boundaries—gender, sexuality, class, race, etc.—during the nineteenth century? What can the construction and destabilization of these social boundaries tell us about the development of the U.S. The sources used to address these questions are diverse, often literary and historical, fluidly moving between “representation” and “reality.” Works of gothic literature by Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, Frances Harper, and Charles Chesnutt, among others, are placed in the contexts of nineteenth-century racial “science” and contemporary discourses about the formation of identity.

Edwards then examines how nineteenth-century writers gothicized biracial and passing figures in order to frame them within the rubric of a “demonization of difference.” By charting such depictions in literature and popular science, he focuses on an obsession in antebellum and postbellum America over the threat of collapsing racial identities—threats that resonated strongly with fears of the transgression of the boundaries of sexuality and the social anxiety concerning the instabilities of gender, class, ethnicity, and nationality. Gothic Passages not only builds upon the work of Americanists who uncover an underlying racial element in U.S. Gothic literature but also sheds new light on the pervasiveness of gothic discourse in nineteenth-century representations of passing from both sides of the color line. This fascinating book will be of interest to scholars of American literature, cultural studies, and African American studies. Category: Literary Criticism.

Author: Charles L. Crow ISBN: 482 Genre: Literary Criticism File Size: 55.4 MB Format: PDF, Docs Download: 936 Read: 1051 This book defines the American Gothic and places it both within the context of the major movements of intellectual history in the last 300 years, and also within the context of the critical issues of American culture.

From Poe to Faulkner to Toni Morrison and Cormac McCarthy, many of the best and most critically acclaimed works of American literature have been Gothic. The book will demonstrate how the Gothic provides a forum for discussing key issues of American culture, for exploring forbidden subjects, and for providing a voice for the repressed and silenced.

Category: Literary Criticism. Author: Maisha Lakaye Wester ISBN: OCLC:659562645 Genre: File Size: 40.47 MB Format: PDF, Docs Download: 915 Read: 828 Consequently the project also challenges traditional notions of identity and history and reveals them as incomplete and constructed narratives. Lastly, this project evaluates how politics and discourses of otherness silences and erases the histories of marginalized groups. The histories of these groups are inevitably sacrificed in order to maintain the dominant culture's narrative. Through my analysis of the various black texts, I posit such dominating and oppressing history as problematic; I furthermore suggest that the dominant culture actually suffers from its suppression of Others histories. Author: Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet ISBN: 143 Genre: Literary Criticism File Size: 45.11 MB Format: PDF, ePub, Docs Download: 189 Read: 727 Taking as its point of departure recent insights about the performative nature of genre, The Poetics and Politics of the American Gothic challenges the critical tendency to accept at face value that gothic literature is mainly about fear.

Instead, Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet argues that the American Gothic, and gothic literature in general, is also about judgment: how to judge and what happens when judgment is confronted with situations that defy its limits. Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, Gilman, and James all shared a concern with the political and ideological debates of their time, but tended to approach these debates indirectly.

Thus, Monnet suggests, while slavery and race are not the explicit subject matter of antebellum works by Poe and Hawthorne, they nevertheless permeate it through suggestive analogies and tacit references. Similarly, Melville, Gilman, and James use the gothic to explore the categories of gender and sexuality that were being renegotiated during the latter half of the century. Focusing on 'The Fall of the House of Usher,' The Marble Faun, Pierre, The Turn of the Screw, and 'The Yellow Wallpaper,' Monnet brings to bear minor texts by the same authors that further enrich her innovative readings of these canonical works. At the same time, her study persuasively argues that the Gothic's endurance and ubiquity are in large part related to its being uniquely adapted to rehearse questions about judgment and justice that continue to fascinate and disturb. Category: Literary Criticism. Author: Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock ISBN: 311 Genre: Literary Criticism File Size: 33.60 MB Format: PDF, ePub, Mobi Download: 590 Read: 572 The Cambridge Companion to American Gothic offers an accessible overview to both the breadth and depth of the American Gothic tradition.

This subgenre features works from many of America's best-known authors: Edgar Allan Poe, Toni Morrison, Stephen King, Anne Rice, Henry James, Edith Wharton, William Faulkner, and Flannery O'Connor. Authored by leading experts in the field, the introduction and sixteen chapters explore the American Gothic chronologically, in relation to different social groups, in connection with different geographic regions, and in different media, including children's literature, poetry, drama, film, television, and gaming. This Companion provides a rich and thorough analysis of the American Gothic tradition from a twenty-first-century standpoint, and will be a key resource undergraduates, graduate students, and professional researchers interested in this topic. Category: Literary Criticism.