American Women's Regionalist Fiction: Mapping the Gothic

by Monika Elbert (Editor), Rita Bode (Editor)

Overview

 American Women’s Regionalist Fiction: Mapping the Gothic seeks to redress the monolithic vision of American Gothic by analyzing the various sectional or regional attempts to Gothicize what is most claustrophobic or peculiar about local history. Since women writers were often relegated to inferior status, it is especially compelling to look at women from the Gothic perspective. The regionalist Gothic develops along the line of difference and not unity—thus emphasizing regional peculiarities or a sense of superiority in terms of regional history, natural landscapes, immigrant customs, folk tales, or idiosyncratic ways.  The essays study the uncanny or the haunting quality of “the commonplace,” as Hawthorne would have it in his introduction to The House of the Seven Gables,  in regionalist Gothic fiction by a wide range of women writers between ca. 1850 and 1930.  This collection seeks to examine how/if the regionalist perspective is small, limited, and stultifying and leads to Gothic moments, or whether the intersection between local and national leads to a clash that is jarring and Gothic in nature.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9783030555528
Publisher:	Palgrave Macmillan
Publication date:	01/04/2021
Series:	Palgrave Gothic
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

Monika Elbert is Professor of English and a Distinguished University Scholar at Montclair State University, USA. She is editor of the Nathaniel Hawthorne Review and her recent publications include: Hawthorne in Context (2018) and, co-edited with Wendy Ryden, Haunting Realities:  Naturalist Gothic and American Realism (2017).

Rita Bode is Professor of English Literature at Trent University, Canada. Her co-edited collections include L.M. Montgomery and the Matter of Nature(s) (2018) and L.M. Montgomery’s Rainbow Valleys: The Ontario Years, 1911-1942 (2015).

Table of Contents

Introduction.- New England Gothic: Resisting Nation.- Nancy Sweet, “Gothic Woods and the Shining City on a Hill: Harriet Prescott Spofford’s ‘Circumstance’”.- Melissa McFarland Pennell, “New England Gothic/New England Guilt: Mary Wilkins Freeman’s Giles Corey and the Salem Witchcraft Episode”.- Cécile Roudeau, “Sarah Orne Jewett’s New England Gothic:  ‘Lady Ferry’ and the Uncanny Durability of Colonial History”.- New England’s Landscapes and the Eco-Gothic.- Rita Bode, “Local Habitations as Gothic Terrain in Rose Terry Cooke”.- Daniel Mrozowski, “Hallowed Ground:  The Gothic New England of Sarah Orne Jewett and Mary Wilkins Freeman”.- Cynthia Murillo, “Life By Landscape: The Sublime and the Spectacle of Transcendence in the Gothic Fiction of Edith Wharton”.- Southern Gothic: Folklore, Superstition, Race.- Alicia Mischa Renfroe ‘That Dim Abode’: Uncanny Region in Rebecca Harding Davis’s “The Tragedy of Fauquier”.- Wendy Ryden, “Gothic Chopin: Negotiating Realism’s Divide in Bayou Folk”.- Ellen Weinauer, “The Gothic and the “Southern Lady”: Catherine Warfield’s The Household of Bouverie”.- Jeffrey Weinstock, “Haunted Homesteads:  E.D.E.N. Southworth’s Dual Gothic”.- Valerie Levy, ““Hoodoo and Voodoo in Zora Neale Hurston’s Gothic Folklore”.- West Coast Gothic.- Lesley Ginsberg, “Mary Austin’s California Gothic”.- Dara Downey, “Emma Frances Dawson’s Urban California Gothic”.-  Laura Laffrado, “’It Will Haunt the Reader after the Others have Faded into the Mists’: The Gothic West of Ella Rhoads Higginson’s ‘In the Bitter Root Mountains’”.- Laura Mielke, “Zitkala Sa’s Defiant Gothicism”.- Midwest Hauntings.- Monika Elbert, “Alice Cary and Margaret Fuller: Mundane Musings and Great Lakes Hauntings”.-  Stéphanie Durrans, “Specters of the Great Plains: Cather’s My Antonia as a Gothic Regionalist Novel”.-  Jane Anne Fleming, “Gothic Spaces and the “Homeland”: Resisting Exceptionalism in Constance FenimoreWoolson’s Tales of the Great Lakes and Reconstruction”.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“The individual essays collected in American Women’s Regionalist Fiction: Mapping the Gothic are valuable as perceptive studies of a wide range of women writers, but the book is ultimately more than the sum of its parts. Together, these essays establish the existence of a powerful literary tradition that unites Gothic conventions with a feminist exploration of landscape and place. Monika Elbert and Rita Bode and their contributors provide a compelling argument for the importance of this feminist transformation of Gothic spaces in the United States while recovering and illuminating a number of unjustly neglected texts.” (Alfred Bendixen, Lecturer in English, Princeton University, USA, and Executive Director, American Literature Association)