Goddu traces the development of the female, southern, and African-American gothic in literature between the Revolutionary and Civil Wars, placing in a new historical context Poe's The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, Hawthorne's The Blithedale Romance, Alcott's ghost stories, and Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl.

A fascinating journey into the dark heart of the American gothic that analyzes its connections to race and racism in 21st-century America Haunted houses, bitter revenants and muffled heartbeats under floorboards—the American gothic is a macabre tale based on a true story. Part memoir and part cultural critique, Darkly explores American culture’s inevitable gothicity in the traces left from chattel slavery. The persistence of white supremacy and the ubiquity of Black death feeds a national culture of terror and a perpetual undercurrent of mourning. If the gothic narrative is metabolized fear, if the goth aesthetic is

Describes Grant Wood's portrait of Iowa farmers, and documents how the piece has represented midwestern Puritanism, hard-working endurance, and the often-parodied American heartland.

Defining the American gothic tradition both within the context of the major movements of intellectual history over the past three-hundred years, as well as within the issues critical to American culture, this comprehensive volume covers a diverse terrain of well-known American writers, from Poe to Faulkner to Toni Morrison and Cormac McCarthy. Charles L. Crow demonstrates how the gothic provides a forum for discussing key issues of changing American culture, explores forbidden subjects, and provides a voice for the repressed and silenced.

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.

The Rural Gothic in American Popular Culture argues that complex and often negative initial responses of early European settlers continue to influence American horror and gothic narratives to this day. The book undertakes a detailed analysis of key literary and filmic texts situated within consideration of specific contexts.

American Gothic Art and Architecture in the Age of Romantic Literature analyses the impact British Gothic novels and historical romances had on American art and architecture in the Romantic era. Key figures include Thomas Jefferson, Washington Allston, Alexander Jackson Davis, James Fenimore Cooper, Washington Irving, Thomas Cole, Edwin Forrest and Nathaniel Hawthorne. Hawthorne articulated the subject of this book when he wrote that he could understand Sir Walter Scott’s romances better after viewing Scott’s Gothic Revival house Abbotsford, and he understood the house better for having read the romances. This study investigates this symbiotic relationship between the arts and Gothic literature to reveal new interpretative possibilities. Contents Introduction Chapter One. Gothic Monticello: Thomas Jefferson’s Garden Narratives Chapter Two. ‘Banditti Mania’: The Gothic Haunting of Washington Allston Chapter Three. ‘Arranging the Trap Doors’: The Gothic Revival Castles of Alexander Jackson Davis Chapter Four. Old Dwellings Transmogrified: The Homes of James Fenimore Cooper and Washington Irving Chapter Five. Gothic Castles in the Landscape: Thomas Cole, Sir Walter Scott And the Hudson River School of Painting Chapter Six. The Theatrical Spectacle of Medieval Revival: Edwin Forrest’s Fonthill Castle Conclusion. ‘Clap It Into a Romance:’ Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Gothic Houses