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EcoGothic

Ecocriticism has hardly begun to engage with the Gothic, despite that genre’s links to Romanticism. Ecogothic corrects this omission, and asks why this situation has arisen. The volume considers the relevance of this highly contemporary theoretical approach to Gothic works from the eighteenth century to the present, and deploys an international body of scholars drawn from the cutting edges of both Gothic criticism and ecocriticism in order to challenge the current assumptions of both. The key themes which preoccupy ecocriticism – such as wilderness, apocalypse, the concept of home, and the relationship of the human to greater nature – are duly acknowledged in Ecogothic, and tested and expanded through an exposure to Gothic and Gothic-inflected texts which may be less familiar to those who customarily work within the theory. The collection opens with an essay by the editors that innovatively redefines ecocriticism for the purposes of this deployment of the theory, before moving on to an interrogation of the eighteenth century Gothic novel. The common motif of ice and its association with monstrosity then informs a comparison of nineteenth- and twentieth-century fictions of frozen terrain. The collection ranges from analysis of Margaret Atwood – whose creative and critical work spans both traditions – to an ecocritical reading of the cult 1970s British film, The Wicker Man. I was responsible for the commissioning and editing of 50% of Ecogothic, was co-author of the introduction and provided one of the chapters. My editing and my own chapter are informed by the work of the Writing and Environment Research Centre at BSU.