A Companion to American GothicCharles L.Crow, Editor. Chichester, UK: John Wiley & Sons, 2014.

Abstract

A Companion to Gothic Charles L. Crow, Editor. Chichester, UK: John Wiley & Sons, 2014.Gothic studies has been booming since the turn of the twenty-first century. In 2013 alone, over fifteen academic studies were published with the word in the title. The University of Chicago Press, in collaboration with the University of Wales Press, began releasing books in a Gothic Literary Series in 2009; the series already boasts over twenty volumes. The market also offers books devoted to Gothic subtypes, including Cynthia J. Miller and A. Bowdoin Van Riper's essay collections Undead in the West: Vampires, Zombies, Mummies, and Ghosts on the Cinematic Frontier (2012), Undead in the West II: They Just Keep Coming Back (2013), Bernice M. Murphy's The Suburban Gothic in Popular Culture (2009), and The Rural Gothic in Popular Culture (2013). In addition, texts have emerged that focus on nations with plentiful gothic production which have been largely ignored-such as Michael J. Blouin's Japan and the Cosmopolitan Gothic: Specters of Modernity (2013), Ken Gelder and Rachael Weaver's 2007 Anthology of Australian Gothic Fiction, and Justin D. Edwards's Gothic Canada: Reading the Spectre of a National Literature (2005). America's gothic tradition has offered especially fertile scholarly ground.Even within such a crowded market, Charles L. Crow's edited collection, A Companion to the stands out for both its expansive ness as well as its impressive gathering of contributors. Not only are the individual authors notable experts, but Crow himself is an important figure in the field of the having published both Gothic: An Anthology 1787-1916 (1999) and History of the Gothic: Gothic (2009). Each author provides a roughly ten-page introduction (several penned two) on an aspect of the and each of these includes a considerable bibliography, cross-references to other essays in the book, and suggestions for further reading. At almost 600 pages long and comprising forty-two chapters, Crow's text will be a staple of gothic studies.The book is divided into seven parts, the first three investigating foundational concepts. In Theorizing Gothic, scholars focus on theoretical frameworks: Jerrold E. Hogle, for example, examines how the study of Gothic has progressed in tandem with literary criticism, while Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock catalogues prominent American Monsters. The second section, Origins of Gothic, contains essays on slave narratives (written by Teresa Goddu, whose Gothic American: Narrative, History, Nation is a foundational text in the field), Indian captivity narratives, and the urban gothic of the nineteenth century. Carol Margaret Davison, author of two recent gothic studies, provides an introduction to Charles Brockden Brown-often considered America's first gothic writer-while Benjamin F. …