This book contributes to an emerging field of study and provides new perspectives on the ways in which Gothic literature, visual media, and other cultural forms explicitly engage gender, sexuality, form, and genre. The collection is a forum in which the ideas of several well-respected critics converge, producing a breadth of knowledge and a diversity of subject areas and methodologies. It is concerned with several questions, including: How can we discuss Gothic as a genre that crosses over boundaries constructed by a culture to define and contain gender and sexuality? How do transgender bodies specifically mark or disrupt this boundary crossing? In what ways does the Gothic open up a plural narrative space for transgenre explorations, encounters, and experimentation? With this, the volume’s chapters explore expected categories such as transgenders, transbodies, and transembodiments, but also broader concepts that move through and beyond the limits of gender identity and sexuality, such as transhistories, transpolitics, transmodalities, and transgenres. Illuminating such areas as the appropriation of the trans body in Gothic literature and film, the function of trans rhetorics in memoir, textual markers of transgenderism, and the Gothic’s transgeneric qualities, the chapters offer innovative, but not limited, ways to interpret the Gothic. In addition, the book intersects with but also troubles non-trans feminist and queer readings of the Gothic. Together, these diverse approaches engage the Gothic as a definitively trans subject, and offer new and exciting connections and insights into Gothic, Media, Film, Narrative, and Gender and Sexuality Studies.

The Routledge Handbook of Trans Literature examines the intersection of transgender studies and literary studies, bringing together essays from global experts in the field. This volume provides a comprehensive overview of trans literature, highlighting the core topics, genres, and periods important for scholarship now and in the future. Covering the main approaches and key literary genres of the area, this volume includes: Examination of the core topics guiding contemporary trans literary theory and criticism, including the Anthropocene, archival speculation, activism, BDSM, Black studies, critical plant studies, culture, diaspora, disability, ethnocentrism, home, inclusion, monstrosity, nondualist philosophies, nonlinearity, paradox, pedagogy, performativity, poetics, religion, suspense, temporality, visibility, and water. Exploration of diverse literary genres, forms, and periods through a trans lens, such as archival fiction, artificial intelligence narratives, autobiography, climate fiction, comics, creative writing, diaspora fiction, drama, fan fiction, gothic fiction, historical fiction, manga, medieval literature, minor literature, modernist literature, mystery and detective fiction, nature writing, poetry, postcolonial literature, radical literature, realist fiction, Renaissance literature, Romantic literature, science fiction, travel writing, utopian literature, Victorian literature, and young adult literature. This comprehensive volume will be of great interest to scholars and students of literature, gender studies, trans studies, literary theory, and literary criticism.

Lee Mandelo's debut Summer Sons is a sweltering, queer Southern Gothic that crosses Appalachian street racing with academic intrigue, all haunted by a hungry ghost. Andrew and Eddie did everything together, best friends bonded more deeply than brothers, until Eddie left Andrew behind to start his graduate program at Vanderbilt. Six months later, only days before Andrew was to join him in Nashville, Eddie dies of an apparent suicide. He leaves Andrew a horrible inheritance: a roommate he doesn’t know, friends he never asked for, and a gruesome phantom that hungers for him. As Andrew searches for the truth of Eddie’s death, he uncovers the lies and secrets left behind by the person he trusted most, discovering a family history soaked in blood and death. Whirling between the backstabbing academic world where Eddie spent his days and the circle of hot boys, fast cars, and hard drugs that ruled Eddie’s nights, the walls Andrew has built against the world begin to crumble. And there is something awful lurking, waiting for those walls to fall. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

The Routledge Companion to Eighteenth-Century Literatures in English brings together essays that respond to consequential cultural and socio-economic changes that followed the expansion of the British Empire from the British Isles across the Atlantic. Scholars track the cumulative power of the slave trade, settlements and plantations, and the continual warfare that reshaped lives in the Americas, Africa, and Asia. Importantly, they also analyze the ways these histories reshaped class and social relations, scientific inquiry and invention, philosophies of personhood, and cultural and intellectual production. As European nations fought each other for territories and trade routes, dispossessing and enslaving Indigenous and Black people, the observations of travellers, naturalists, and colonists helped consolidate racism and racial differentiation, as well as the philosophical justifications of “civilizational” differences that became the hallmarks of intellectual life. Essays in this volume address key shifts in disciplinary practices even as they examine the past, looking forward to and modeling a rethinking of our scholarly and pedagogic practices. This volume is an essential text for academics, researchers, and students researching eighteenth-century literature, history, and culture.

This book, Victorians and Their Animals: Beast on a Leash, investigates the notion that British Victorians did see themselves as naturally dominant species over other humans and over animals. They conscientiously, hegemonically were determined to rule those beneath them and the animal within themselves albeit with varying degrees of success and failure. The articles in this collection apply posthuman and other theories, including queer, postcolonialism, deconstruction, and Marxism, in their exploration of Victorian attitudes toward animals. They study the biopolitical relationships between human and nonhuman animals in several key Victorian literary works. Some of this book’s chapters deal with animal ethics and moral aesthetics. Also being studied is the representation of animals in several Victorian novels as narrative devices to signify class status and gender dynamics, either to iterate socially acceptable mores or to satirize hypocrisy or breach of behavior or to voice social protest. All of the chapters analyse the interdependence of people and animals during the nineteenth century.

Across the eighteenth century in Britain, readers, writers, and theater-goers were fascinated by women who dressed in men’s clothing—from actresses on stage who showed their shapely legs to advantage in men’s breeches to stories of valiant female soldiers and ruthless female pirates. Spanning genres from plays, novels, and poetry to pamphlets and broadsides, the cross-dressing woman came to signal more than female independence or unconventional behaviors; she also came to signal an investment in female same-sex intimacies and sapphic desires. Sapphic Crossings reveals how various British texts from the period associate female cross-dressing with the exciting possibility of intimate, embodied same-sex relationships. Ula Lukszo Klein reconsiders the role of lesbian desires and their structuring through cross-gender embodiments as crucial not only to the history of sexuality but to the rise of modern concepts of gender, sexuality, and desire. She prompts readers to rethink the roots of lesbianism and transgender identities today and introduces new ways of thinking about embodied sexuality in the past.

This collection provides new readings of Frankenstein from a myriad of established and burgeoning theoretical vantages including narrative theory, cognitive and affect theory, the new materialism, media theory, critical race theory, queer and gender studies, deconstruction, psychoanalysis, and others. Demonstrating how the literary power of Frankenstein rests on its ability to theorize questions of mind, self, language, matter, and the socio-historic that also drive these critical approaches, this volume illustrates the ongoing intellectual richness found both in Mary Shelley's work and contemporary ways of thinking about it.