THE CAMBRIDGE COMPANION TO AMERICAN GOTHIC
Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock, ed.
Cambridge University Press
Gothic may have been born in Britain, but it was America that gave it its darker and more horrific shades, thanks to Edgar Allan Poe, who singlehandedly invented the genre of fiction we know and love. Still, there is much more – both before and after Poe – that the young nation brought to the bloody table, as demonstrated by this selection of sixteen scholarly essays, plus introduction.
The book is divided into three parts: the first deals with gothic in various historical periods: early America (puritan and newly republican), the ages of romanticism, realism, naturalism, and modernism, plus the contemporary period. The second covers identities (racial, female, queer) and locations (frontier, urban, and the South). The…