
Gothic Things
Dark Enchantment and Anthropocene Anxiety
Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock(Author)
Fordham University Press
Published on 4. July 2023
Book
Hardback
240 pages
978-1-5315-0341-3 (ISBN)
Description
SHORTLISTED, THE ALLAN LLOYD SMITH PRIZE FOR BEST MONOGRAPH
Offering an innovative approach to the Gothic, Gothic Things: Dark Enchantment and Anthropocene Anxiety breaks ground with a new materialist analysis of the genre, highlighting the ways that, since its origins in the eighteenth century, the Gothic has been intensely focused on "ominous matter" and "thing power." In chapters attending to gothic bodies, spaces, books, and other objects, Gothic Things argues that the Gothic has always been about what happens when objects assume mysterious animacy or potency and when human beings are reduced to the status of just one thing among many-more powerful-others.
In exploring how the Gothic insistently decenters the human, Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock reveals human beings to be enmeshed in networks of human and nonhuman forces mostly outside of their control. Gothic Things thus resituates the Gothic as the uncanny doppelgaenger of twenty-first-century critical and cultural theory, lurking just beneath the surface (and sometimes explicitly surfacing) as it haunts considerations of how human beings interact with objects and their environment. In these pages the Gothic offers a dark reflection of the contemporary "nonhuman turn," expressing a twenty-first-century structure of feeling undergirded by anxiety over the fate of the human: spectrality, monstrosity, and apocalypse.
Substituting horror for hope, the Gothic, Weinstock explains, has been a philosophical meditation on human relations to the nonhuman since its inception, raising significant questions about how we can counter anthropocentric thought in our quest to live more harmoniously with the world around us.
Offering an innovative approach to the Gothic, Gothic Things: Dark Enchantment and Anthropocene Anxiety breaks ground with a new materialist analysis of the genre, highlighting the ways that, since its origins in the eighteenth century, the Gothic has been intensely focused on "ominous matter" and "thing power." In chapters attending to gothic bodies, spaces, books, and other objects, Gothic Things argues that the Gothic has always been about what happens when objects assume mysterious animacy or potency and when human beings are reduced to the status of just one thing among many-more powerful-others.
In exploring how the Gothic insistently decenters the human, Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock reveals human beings to be enmeshed in networks of human and nonhuman forces mostly outside of their control. Gothic Things thus resituates the Gothic as the uncanny doppelgaenger of twenty-first-century critical and cultural theory, lurking just beneath the surface (and sometimes explicitly surfacing) as it haunts considerations of how human beings interact with objects and their environment. In these pages the Gothic offers a dark reflection of the contemporary "nonhuman turn," expressing a twenty-first-century structure of feeling undergirded by anxiety over the fate of the human: spectrality, monstrosity, and apocalypse.
Substituting horror for hope, the Gothic, Weinstock explains, has been a philosophical meditation on human relations to the nonhuman since its inception, raising significant questions about how we can counter anthropocentric thought in our quest to live more harmoniously with the world around us.
More details
Edition
New edition
Language
English
Place of publication
New York
United States
Target group
Professional and scholarly
Edition type
New edition
Product notice
Cloth over boards
Illustrations
24 b&w illustrations
Dimensions
Height: 229 mm
Width: 152 mm
Thickness: 16 mm
Weight
458 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-5315-0341-3 (9781531503413)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions

E-Book
07/2023
Fordham University Press
€33.99
Available for download
Person
Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock is Professor of English at Central Michigan University and associate editor in charge of horror for the Los Angeles Review of Books. His most recent books include Giving the Devil His Due: Satan and Cinema (with Regina Hansen, Fordham, 2021), The Monster Theory Reader (University of Minnesota Press, 2020), and The Cambridge Companion to the American Gothic (Cambridge University Press, 2018). Visit him at JeffreyAndrewWeinstock.com.
Content
Preface: Three Beginnings vii
Introduction: Ominous Matter 1
1 Gothic Thing Theory 19
2 Dark Enchantment and Gothic Materialism 41
3 Body-as-Thing 72
4 Thing-as- Body 91
5 Book: How to Do Things with Words 115
6 Building: Bigger on the Inside 137
Epilogue: The Ominous Matter of One's Ordinary Life 171
Acknowledgments 173
Notes 175
Works Cited 181
Index 195
Introduction: Ominous Matter 1
1 Gothic Thing Theory 19
2 Dark Enchantment and Gothic Materialism 41
3 Body-as-Thing 72
4 Thing-as- Body 91
5 Book: How to Do Things with Words 115
6 Building: Bigger on the Inside 137
Epilogue: The Ominous Matter of One's Ordinary Life 171
Acknowledgments 173
Notes 175
Works Cited 181
Index 195