Gothic Animals
Description
This book begins with the assumption that the presence of non-human creatures causes an always-already uncanny rift in human assumptions about reality. Exploring the dark side of animal nature and the 'otherness' of animals as viewed by humans, and employing cutting-edge theory on non-human animals, eco-criticism, literary and cultural theory, this book takes the Gothic genre into new territory.
After the dissemination of Darwin's theories of evolution, nineteenth-century fiction quickly picked up on the idea of the 'animal within'. Here, the fear explored was of an unruly, defiant, degenerate and entirely amoral animality lying (mostly) dormant within all of us. However, non-humans and humans have other sorts of encounters, too, and even before Darwin, humans have often had an uneasy relationship with animals, which, as Donna Haraway puts it, have a way of 'looking back' at us. In this book, the focus is not on the 'animal within' but rather on the animal 'with-out': otherand entirely incomprehensible.
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Ruth Heholt is a senior lecturer in English at Falmouth University. She has published widely on the topics of the Gothic, crime, gender and the supernatural. She is currently completing a monograph on the Victorian writer Catherine Crowe and is editor of the journal Revenant: Critical and Creative Studies of the Supernatural .
Melissa Edmundson is a lecturer in English at Clemson University and specializes in nineteenth- and twentieth-century women writers and supernatural fiction. She is the author of Women's Ghost Literature in Nineteenth-Century Britain (University of Wales Press, 2013) and Women's Colonial Gothic Writing, 1850-1930: Haunted Empire (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018).
Content
Chapter 1. Introduction.- Part I. Hell-Beasts and Haunting.- Chapter 2. 'Like a Madd Dogge': Demonic Animals and Animal Demoniacs in Early Modern English Possession Narratives.- Chapter 3. 'Most Hideous of Gaolers': The Spider in Ernest G. Henham's Tenebrae .- Chapter 4. Devouring the Animal Within: Uncanny Otherness in Richard Adams's Plague Dogs .- Chapter 5. Hunted, Now Haunting: The Figure of the Thylacine in Tasmanian Gothic Fiction.- Chapter 6. 'What Do I Use to Make Them Afraid?': The Gothic Animal and the Problem of Legitimacy in American Superhero Comics.- Chapter 7. The Monster Shark Still Lives: The Lazarus Taxon and Spectral Animal Bodies.- Chapter 8. 'Rats is Bogies I Tell You, and Bogies is Rats': Rats, Repression, and the Gothic Mode.- Chapter 9. At Home with Miniature Sea-monsters: Philip Henry Gosse.- Chapter 10. Uncanny Snails: Patricia Highsmith and the Allure of the Gastropod.- Chapter 11. 'I Have Flyophobia': Jane Rice's 'The Idol of the Flies' and Evil as Unwelcome Houseguest.- Chapter 12. 'Encircled by Minute, Evilly-Intentioned Airplanes': The Uncanny Biopolitics of Robotic Bees.- Part III. Cultural Anxiety, Violence, and the Non-Human Body.- Chapter 13. A Bark and Stormy Night: Ann Radcliffe's Animals.- Chapter 14. Hellish Horses and Monstrous Men: Gothic Horsemanship in Washington Irving and Edgar Allan Poe.- Chapter 15. The Colonial Idol, the Animalistic, and the New Woman in the Imperial Gothic of Richard Marsh.- Chapter 16. Victor Hugo's Pieuvre and the Marine EcoGothic.- Chapter 17. The Human Within and the Animal Without?: Rats and Mr Bunnsy in Terry Pratchett's The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents .- Chapter 18. Companion Animals in Contemporary Scottish Women's Gothic.