Table of Contents
Acknowledgments vi
Introduction Possessions: Property and Propriety in the English Gothic Mode 1
Part I Castle and Moat: Property Possession in the English Gothic
1 Slippery Properties: The Castle of Otranto and The Old English Baron 13
2 A Century of Loss: Historical Contexts for Property Anxieties 19
3 Fantasies of Return: Property Restoration Imagined 28
4 Nineteenth-Century Expansions 35
Part II Ghosts: Possession of Person in the English Gothic
5 Self-(Dis)Possession in The Woman in White 47
6 Dispossessions of the Mind and the Body: A Gothic Tropology 56
7 The Double and the Ghost: Refusals of Self-(Dis)Possession 67
8 Resurrection Fantasies: Defying Death's Dispossessions 76
9 Slavery and Marriage: Gothic Reflections of Political Rhetoric 81
10 Missing Mothers and Suppressed Sisters: The Dangers of Primogeniture 103
Part III Fragmented Stories; Appropriated Voices: Possession of the Narrative in the English Gothic
11 Gothic Conventions; Narrative Dispossessions 123
12 Contexts of Contested Narratives: Can the Text Be Possessed? 132
13 The Theology of Narrative Dispossession in Maturin's Melmoth the Wanderer 137
14 Dispossessed and Dispossessing: The Wandering Jew's Possession of Voice and Narrative 150
Part IV Beyond the End: Dispossessing Closure
15 "It is only the theory I want": Repossessing Fiction in Sarah Waters's Affinity 169
16 The Political Fantastic 191
Conclusion. Toward a Transatlantic Investigation: Possession and Dispossession in American Gothic Literature 197
Chapter Notes 203
Bibliography 223
Index 231