American Gothic Research Articles

“We Found the Witch, May We Burn Her?”: Suburban Gothic, Witch‐Hunting, and Anxiety‐Induced Conformity in Stephen King's Carrie

Up until now everything around here has been, well, pleasant. Recently, certain things have become unpleasant. It seems to me that thing we have to do is to separate out things that are pleasant from things that are unpleasant.Pleasantville (1998)In decades following Second World War, suburban gothic emerged as quintessential mode in which American writers chose to express myriad sociocultural concerns in an age of uncertainty. In novels of most prolific gothic writers, suburbia is habitually depicted as liminal space: Twilight Zone in which all aspects of development, whether personal or social, remain in suspended animation. vast proliferation of cookie-cutter houses and hosts of indistinguishable residents both hint at homogenization and ceaseless need to blend in -to be just like everyone else in society where going against grain is strictly prohibited. most disturbing aspect of suburban gothic, however, lies within its power to dislodge founding myth of America as of light and affirmation (Fiedler 29), generating most disquieting sense of epistemological ambivalence.Bernice M. Murphy comes close to establishing working definition of suburban gothic, describing it as a sub-genre of wider American Gothic tradition which dramatizes anxieties arising from mass urbanization of United States and usually features suburban settings, preoccupations and protagonists (Suburban 2), though this definition by no means accounts for all hefty and peculiar baggage that accompanies this type of fiction. Murphy nonetheless recognizes that suburban gothic is concerned first and foremost, with playing upon lingering suspicion that even most ordinary-looking neighborhood, or house, or family, has something to hide, and that no matter how calm and settled place looks, it is only ever moment away from dramatic (and generally sinister) incident (2), drawing attention to genre's tendency to overturn idyllic assumptions regarding American life.The problematic nature of suburban social structures becomes even more apparent when viewed in light of Mary Douglas's theories on pollution behaviors and taboo. staggering incidence of homogenization and conformity- both of which have become synonymous with expansion of suburbs-in Rod Serling's The Monsters are Due on Street (1960, Maple Street) and Stephen King's Carrie (1974), in particular, reveals deeper underlying social anxieties that plague New World. Leslie Fiedler's seminal study Love and Death in American Novel (1960), text to propose that American national narrative is quintessentially gothic one, serves as an appropriate starting point for gauging how these particular works fit into longestablished tradition of American gothic. Fiedler begins by tying American literature to nation's shadowy history and claims,Our fiction is not merely in flight from physical data of actual world, in search of (sexless and dim) ideal... it is, bewilderingly and embarrassingly, gothic fiction, nonrealistic and negative, sadist and melodramatic-a literature of and in land of light and affirmation. (29)This suggests that since its inception, American fiction has situated itself on borderlands between rigid binary oppositions such as and light, assuming kind of liminal status. effect of darkness and the grotesque infiltrating of light and affirmation is nothing short of disturbing, as it immediately unsettles America's self-mythologization as nation of and harmony (Goddu 4). It is thus no wonder that American writers have chosen suburbs, superficially very picture of hope and harmony, place where close-knit families supposedly coexist peacefully in secure environment, as setting in which to upend such myths. …

The American and Irish Gothic Novels: From Gloom to Doom

The main purpose of this paper is to highlight the gloomy atmosphere in the American and Irish gothic novels as a reaction to the introspection of the dark side of the human nature and the ideological conflict or clash with other human groups. In this paper, a comparative close reading analysis will be implemented on Brown's Edger Huntly and Melville's Moby Dick from the American gothic novels, and on Maturin's Melmoth the Wanderer from the Irish literature, in order to prove how the gloomy atmosphere is one of the basic elements in the American and Irish gothic novels.

Flannery O'Connor: la violencia y la gracia

Este artículo es resultado de la lectura de algunos relatos de Flannery O’Connor desde la perspectiva del llamado “gótico americano”. El propósito es explorar el tema de la violencia que predomina en la narrativa de esta autora acompañado de su idea de la gracia, en el sentido cristiano del término. O’Connor era una escritora profundamente católica y en sus cuentos busca que la gracia llegue no sólo a sus personajes sino también a sus lectores. Se trata de una suerte de revelación que puede tener lugar en su conciencia a partir de una experiencia terrible que lostransforma.

American Gothic Culture: An Edinburgh Companion

American Gothic Culture: An Edinburgh Companion

American Gothic: The Life of Grant Wood by Susan Wood

Reviewed by: American Gothic: The Life of Grant Wood by Susan Wood Elizabeth Bush Wood, Susan American Gothic: The Life of Grant Wood; illus. by Ross MacDonald. Abrams, 2017 40p Trade ed. ISBN 978-1-4197-2533-3 $18.95 E-book ed. ISBN 978-1-68335-097-9 $15.54 R Gr. 3-5 Here middle-grade readers meet a twentieth-century Iowan, Grant Wood, who knows he wants to paint, knows what he wants to paint (other Iowans), knows where to learn to paint (Paris, obviously), but just can’t reconcile the painterly styles then in vogue—Impressionism, Cubism, Abstract Art—with his subject matter. Hazy views of French cathedrals, faces parsed into multiple planes, colored geometric forms had little to do with the bib overalls, rolling farmland, and framed houses that consumed his interest, and even less to do with the economic challenges of the Great Depression holding sway over America’s economy. A gothic arched window in an Iowa farmhouse, however, caught Wood’s attention, connecting his European experience with American reality, and inspired what would become not only his signature painting but also a seminal work of the American Regionalist school, American Gothic. Susan Wood addresses head-on some of the debates and myths surrounding the cryptic figures of the iconic pitchfork and its dour owners, and she selects several other paintings for viewing and discussion which explore Wood’s participation in the homegrown art movement he helped to found. MacDonald is an ideal choice for illustrator, with his signature retro style and saturated colors that recall early Disney animation and Little Golden Books, which intersected the Regionalist era. An author’s note, timeline, list of sources, reproductions of several Wood’s paintings, and a large photograph of Wood posing in his studio are also included. [End Page 46] Copyright © 2017 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

“The Spirits Talk to Us”: Regionalism, Poverty, and Romance in Mexican American Gothic Fiction

This essay examines Mary Castillo's 2012 Lost in the Light and Alisa Valdes's 2013 The Temptation ofDemetrio VigiL both Mexican American gothic romances. The characters of both novels traverse parts of what are usually called the West, but which Americo Paredes called Greater Mexico, a term that I adapt to show the often-suppressed presence of Mexican Americans throughout the region. In these novels each heroine's close relationship with her ghostly protagonist--one a poor Mexican American liquor smuggler in the 1920s, the other a poor cholo gangbanger from the near present--reveals specificities and differences between regional experiences, especially those of working-class and poor Mexican Americans. Through the lens of gothic theory and critical regionalism, I consider the ways that specific Mexican American cultures are evoked through the plot elements of a popular genre like the gothic romance. I argue that the striking prevalence of scenes of Mexican American regional and ethnic poverty in what would seem to be beach read popular novels suggests that in the Mexican American gothic, the sense of anxiety and abjection requires uneasy scenes of Mexican American destitution and violence, scenes which function as the true heart of gothic fear and uncertainty for their heroines. African-American authors' appropriation and revision of Gothic conventions shows that the gothic is not a transhistorical, static category but a dynamic mode that undergoes historical change.... --Teresa Goddu, Gothic America: Narrative, History, and Nation In gothic temporality the past does not dissolve itself smoothly as the present takes its place. Instead, traces of the past remain active, rebounding upon, clawing back, interrupting, exposing, and even mocking the actions and intentions of today....Gothic meets regionalism when pathological or corrupt historical residues are located, not in a rotten patrilineage or a family secret, but rather in a community mentality.... --Jennifer Lawn, Scarfies, Dunedin Gothic, and the Spirit of Capitalism We're Orihuelas and Mexicans. The spirits talk to us.' --Mary Castillo, Lost in the Light At the beginning of Mary Castillo's 2012 modern gothic romance Lost in the Light, present-day, working-class, Mexican American1 police detective Dori Orihuela is at a low ebb in her life. Wounded in a shootout, on leave pending an investigation, suffering from mild PTSD, not sure she can afford her tumble-down Carpenter Gothic home, she is hyperalert and vulnerable. To make things worse, the handsome Mexican American contractor on her house turns out to be Gavin, her ex-boyfriend, who broke up with her because he believes she cheated on him. In this state, on one particularly bad day a stranger suddenly appears, first outside, then in the parlor of her house, as if by magic. The man, we will discover, is in fact a revenant, a ghost tied to a specific place: he is Vicente Sorolla, a poor Mexican American from the barrio who, for a time, made good during the Prohibition in the violent, unstable liquor smuggling business on the California-Mexico border. His betrayal and death in Dori's house (he doesn't know what happened to his body or to his love, Ana Vasquez, after he died) ties him ineluctably to the house itself. Dori is forced to watch as Vicente relives his last day and his graphic beating death by Anglo deputies in her parlor: Two red-faced men stood over Vince, laughing as he fought for breath. His jacket was half ripped off, dirtied with boot prints. A pool of blood oozed off the rug and onto the wood floor. His fingers were so broken and mangled, they were more pulp than skin and bone. No one's going to miss one more grease bag Mexican, the two men joked. Dori saw the deputy stars on their belts. One had a bloody chain wrapped around his fist.... Through the swollen folds of skin [Dori] made out his eyes, staring straight into hers. Do you see me? he wheezed. His cold, bloodied hand squeezed her foot. …

Journeys into Darkness: Critical Essays on Gothic HorrorJamesGoho. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2014.

Journeys into Darkness: Critical Essays on Gothic Horror James Goho. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2014.This collection of essays examines what author calls dread... primal fear and an ontological unease in world (3). Containing ten chapters, six of which are revisions of previously published essays, Goho explores four themes found in Gothic literature. These four include urban landscape, wilderness, manifestation of economic, social, and political anxieties and conflicts, and a voice which is given to those who suffer or experience evil (3, 4). Essays consider five American and two British authors, including Charles Brockden Brown, Edgar Allan Poe, Ambrose Bierce, Algernon Blackwood, Arthur Machen, H. P. Lo veer aft, and Fritz Leiber.According to author, all four of themes mentioned above can be found in fiction of Charles Brockden Brown. Goho states that Brown created not just American Urban Gothic, but American Gothic as a whole. Flis novels depict family disintegration and individual disintegration through collisions with uncanny (7). Goho discusses three of Brown's novels in this chapter with Wieland being an example of how isolation of wilderness can turn a family man into a killer; Arthur Mervyn being an example of how disease can turn civilized people into savages; and, Edgar Huntly being an example of how civilized man turns into a savage in wilderness, when confronted with savages who are already there (American Indians.Likewise, these four themes can be found in a variety of works that trace their beginning to Salem trials. Witchcraft, an Old World phenomenon, found fertile ground in New World among the dark, brooding side of Puritanism (163), fear of Indians and vast, potentially hostile wilderness. Attempting to escape economic, political, social, and religious injustice, colonists merely recreated New World in image of Old. He examines a number of witch narratives, such as those by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, Edith Wharton, Fritz Leiber, and John Updike. Anyone who reads contemporary horror fiction or watches films in genre knows that is not dead. Rather she is a continuing archetype because... [she] speaks to a primal fear. It is not fear of a witch; rather is fear of relentless and violent persecution (176) that induces us to read or watch these instantiations of Gothic.Goho analyzes four short works by prolific British writer Arthur Machen that reflect third theme of Gothic. These are Great God Pan, Inmost Light, Shining Pyramid, and White People. These stories were written in late Victorian era; all concern science and ask question, Do ends justify means? The male scientists in stories certainly believe answer is yes, and each story illustrates what they are willing to do for knowledge's sake. In each story, women are victims of horrific experiments, and, in all, these women die violent deaths. In end, says author, it is all about sacrifice of women to appease desires of men for knowledge and control (73).Algernon Blackwood's Canadian stories, according to Goho, propose that nature is wondrous but perilous (93). Stories such as Wendigo and Haunted Island reveal wilderness landscape as sublime, intensely beautiful, and awe-inspiring, but terrifying in its vastness. It harkens back to our early ancestors and their fear of dark and all that dark contained. And, speaks to fear of loneliness as well. Confronted with wilderness' majesty, one feels how truly small and alone one is. Goho believes that Blackwood's short stories yield a forest beautifully described and ... more alive and sentient than human characters (92).Whereas Blackwood presents wilderness as a backdrop upon which to expose humankind's loneliness, Fritz Leiber sets against urban landscape. …

Bring the Bodies Up: Excavating Washington Square

If cultural anthropologists are correct that our relations with material objects (including the books that we love) are best understood as “entrapping entanglements,” as forged dependencies, it follows that our relations with places may be equally entrapping and entangling.1 One such place for Henry James was his birthplace at 21 Washington Place at Washington Square, which entrapped and entangled him in ways that are revealed, indirectly, in the only work of fiction he ever wrote that he named for an actual place. It is not a cheery story. Cruelty and sadism, familial punishment and revenge; dead children, deadened lives, ghostly relics hatching plots, and unwanted figures from the past returning as if from the grave; everyone and everything in the end tasting of ashes and ruin; and the heroine burying herself in her house on Washington Square, “for life, as it were.” It is Henry James’ American Gothic. Many critics have noted how closely the plot follows an entry in one of his notebooks in which he recorded a dinner table anecdote related by his good friend, the English actress Fanny Kemble, concerning her brother—named Henry—whom she exposed as a cad for attempting, unsuccessfully, to marry for money. But few have noted that none of the strikingly macabre elements in the story can be found there. There are dark forces in James’ American tale (one of the few he attempted) which extend beyond—or lie beneath—its drama. The palimpsest of Washington Square itself, its famous park and monument and architecture, what it preserves and what it conceals of its past, has its analog in the palimpsest of James’ own memory, as his own family history lurks beneath the surface of the story—or is buried beneath it. The reader needs a field guide to know where all the bodies are.

The Gothic and the carnivalesque in American culture

Introduction: Ballyhoo Chapter One: Theory, Practice and Gothic Carnival Chapter Two: 'The Delight of its Horror' - Poe's Carnivals and the Nineteenth-Century American Gothic Chapter Three: Weird Tales and Pulp Subjunctivity Chapter Four: Ray Bradbury and the October Aura Chapter Five: Hosted Horrors of the 1950s and 1960s Chapter Six: Stephen King, Affect and the Real Limits of Gothic Practice Chapter Seven: Every Day is Halloween - Goth and the Gothic Conclusion: Waiting for the Great Pumpkin

Siân Silyn Roberts Gothic Subjects: The Transformation of Individualism in American Fiction, 1790–1861Gothic Subjects: The Transformation of Individualism in American Fiction, 1790–1861. Siân Silyn Roberts. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014. Pp. 239.

Siân Silyn Roberts Gothic Subjects: The Transformation of Individualism in American Fiction, 1790–1861Gothic Subjects: The Transformation of Individualism in American Fiction, 1790–1861. Siân Silyn Roberts. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014. Pp. 239.

"Another Acre or so of Being": Letters from Guy Davenport

My late friend and longtime pen pal Guy Davenport—essayist, classicist, modernist scholar, artist, teacher, and Calvinist pagan—gave conclusive evidence throughout his life and work that all harmony (aesthetic, social, or spiritual) is based on both balance and distance (see “The Fifth Letter”). Undue closeness, argued Guy, invariably leads to discord, meanness, and sentimental “wetness”—all failures of harmony, all opposed to the dictum of Heraclitus (one of the seven Greeks Guy famously translated) that “a dry light is the best soul.” In the title essay of The Geography of the Imagination—the most harmonious book I have ever read—Guy’s searing intellect burns through the occluding familiarity of a number of objects—the stories of Poe, the poems of Walt Whitman, Grant Wood’s American Gothic—and reveals the intricate harmony at work and at play in them. Guy lavishes the same loving attention on obscure or academically unfashionable figures (Ronald Johnson, Charles Burchfield, O. Henry) as he does on canonical ones (Ezra Pound, Pablo Picasso, James Joyce), the only criterion being the balance they afford his labyrinthine imagination, the only principle being the exemplary manner in which they all realize the Shaker saying, Every Force Evolves a Form (the title of another of Guy’s book of essays). At the start of our friendship in 1988, it took me many months to chip away at Guy’s refusal to let me come see him in Lexington, Kentucky. I visited him and his great friend Bonnie Jean Cox a half-dozen times over the years, dragging along girlfriends, wife, child, all to marvel at the sage of Sayre Avenue, who sat on his stored-up treasures of art and literature like a beneficent dragon, breathing Heraclitan fire at his lucky guests. At the end of our friendship in 2004, it again took me many months to read between the lines of Guy’s final letters and discover, too late, that he was dying of lung cancer. This dreadful, final coup of “harmonizing distance” which Guy enacted in our friendship was the most difficult lesson I have ever learned in my life—even more painful to me than my father’s dying, which I gratefully attended. I still have not forgiven Guy, whatever that might mean posthumously. In the same way, I can never “forgive” Joyce or O. Henry, Picasso, or Burchfield, for being so drily distant from my wet and easy grasp. I am able to love these figures because of Guy, who took all things exceptionally unyielding to the human heart—poems, novels, paintings, death itself—and delivered them as gifts of ongoing understanding, with all their obdurate beauties intact.

Cowboys and Vampires

During half of the twentieth century, the socialist states in Eastern and Central Europe functioned as a political Other that helped shape collective identities in the USA. The collapse of the socialist regimes in the early 1990s opened up a new territory for economic, personal and imaginary investments. This territory was soon explored by a number of American novels: John Beckman's The Winter Zoo (2002), Dave Eggers's You Shall Know Our Velocity (2002), Jonathan Safran Foer's Everything Is Illuminated (2002), Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections (2001), William Gibson's Pattern Recognition (2003), Arthur Phillips's Prague (2002) and Gary Shteyngart's The Russian Debutante's Handbook (2002). This article argues that in these novels post‐communist Eastern Europe functions as a region off the symbolic map, a wilderness, often violent, replete with traces of an insistent past. The novels often view the American travellers’ encounters with this landscape through the codes of the American Gothic and Western genres. Thus, the novels frame their investigations of the legacy of authoritarianism, the possibility of cross‐cultural encounters and the consequences of globalisation in literary modes that ultimately refer back to an American cultural tradition and give rise to critical reflections on the formation of American identity after the Cold War.

A Companion to J.R.R. Tolkien ed. by Stuart D. Lee (review)

Reviewed by: A Companion to J.R.R. Tolkien ed. by Stuart D. Lee Jorge Luis Bueno-Alonso Lee, Stuart D. ed. A Companion to J.R.R. Tolkien. Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2014. xxxiv, 568 pp. £120.00. ISBN 978-0-470-65982-3. In his excellent analysis of Tolkien’s prose, Steve Walker pointed out that “seldom has a literary work stirred such a maelstrom of critical controversy as swirled around The Lord of the Rings at its publication.” More than half a century later, this statement keeps on being more than correct. That maelstrom of critical approaches has increased steadily to reach an impressive number of publications on Tolkien’s work in recent times, as we all well know, and as this journal attests to issue after issue. The book reviewed here is an heir of such new approaches and reassessments of Tolkien’s oeuvre. It brings some order to this morass of publications and posthumous books, so diverse in scope and academic depth and quality. Tolkien and his work have finally entered [End Page 177] the canon of Anglo-American studies, marked by being admitted into the prestigious Blackwell Companion collection next to topics such as “American Gothic,” “Translations Studies,” “Victorian Literature and Culture,” or “Modernist Poetry,” just to quote the topics of the immediately previously published four volumes of the series. Carefully edited by Stuart D. Lee—one of the outstanding names of recent Tolkien critical scholarship and co-author of one of the most imaginative books on the relationships between Tolkien’s fiction and medieval English literature (Lee & Solopova)—the volume is divided into five main thematic areas—Life, The Academic, The Legendarium, Context and Critical Approaches—preceded by an editorial introduction. After the customary and, in this case, rather extensive pre-introductory material—Acknowledgements, Notes on Contributors, Editorial Practices and Abbreviations and a Brief Chronology (i-xxxiv)—the editor offers a brief and concise introduction that appropriately describes the philosophy and the contents of the volume. In a volume of considerable length and with so many sections and chapters, the reader appreciates not having to read a review-like introduction. With this brief account the reader has the essential information needed to immediately plunge into the different and well-structured sections of the volume. “Part I: Life” (5-24) presents a biographical approach to Tolkien’s life. Dealing with Tolkien’s biography in less than 25 pages constitutes, as the Old English poet once said, an enta geweorc indeed, a highly difficult task, as attested by the in-depth previous work of Carpenter and the exhaustive thousand-page long chronology by Scull and Hammond. Notwithstanding, John Garth in “A Brief Biography,” the only chapter included in this section, succeeds in presenting an excellent contribution to the topic. Garth, author of one of the most fascinating biographical books on Tolkien and his experience in the Great War, manages to summarize the essence of Tolkien’s life in a well-built chapter. Those who have never read a biography of Tolkien will be able to have a clear picture of the necessary background to go on reading the rest of the volume. Those who are already familiar with Carpenter’s Tolkien biography and The Inklings and Scull and Hammond’s Companion & Guide will have a perfect summary of the main events to refresh those readings and to have the appropriate contextual/historical perspective for the other sections in the Companion. “Part II: The Academic” (25-76) contains three articles covering Tolkien’s main occupation in medieval studies, Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford. Since his fiction was so deeply influenced by his love and knowledge of medieval languages and literatures, it is most logical that this Companion opens with a section devoted to trace this area in his life. Thomas Honegger’s “Academic Writings” deals with Tolkien’s [End Page 178] scholarly publications on words, language, and literature, from the most famous ones on Beowulf and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, to the lesser-known works on some Old English poems and texts. Honegger’s survey is sound and provides the reader with the necessary understanding of how these academic pieces “have become increasingly inter...

The “monster” of Seymour Avenue: Internet crime news and Gothic reportage in the case of Ariel Castro

AbstractWhile American media reportage of heinous crimes has long drawn on Gothic iconography to secure readers, the contemporary digital news market has engendered a trend in crime reporting that transparently imparts the conventions of Victorian horror, and by extension the nineteenth-century American Gothic. Employing a semiotic content analysis of Internet news stories (

De la tradición gótica en la literatura hispanoamericana: “La granja blanca”, de Clemente Palma

This work illustrates the presence of what is known as the «American Gothic» in Clemente Palma's text «La granja blanca». To this end, several texts and themes related with this tradition are notes, such as Edgar Allan Poe's «Oval Portrait», «Ligeia» or «Morella»; other internal and external features of literary gothicism are also pointedout, such as excess and transgression (Fred Botting: 1996) or, referring to the inner characteristics of the female gender, its transformation in an explicit reference to American Gothic (Louis S. Gross: 1989). In light of the aforementioned, we will seek the traces and presence of the Anglosaxon Gothic tradition in Hispanic Literature.

Cover art

Cover art by Han Yan.
 Description: This is a photoshopped image of “American Gothic,” a painting by Grant Wood which depicts a farmer and his daughter. Interestingly, the woman in the painting was modeled by Wood’s sister and their dentist.

Journeys into darkness: critical essays on gothic horror

Acknowledgments Introduction Chapter 1: Dark Beginnings: Fear and Trembling in Novels of Charles Brockden Brown Chapter 2: Poe's Fall of House of Usher: A Predecessor to Lovecraft's Outsider? Chapter 3: The Realm of Suffering: Ambrose Bierce and Phantoms of American Civil War Chapter 4: Suffering and Evil in Short Fiction of Arthur Machen Chapter 5: The Haunted Wood: Algernon Blackwood's Canadian Stories Chapter 6: The Sickness unto Death in H. P. Lovecraft's Hound Chapter 7: The Aboriginal in Works of H. P. Lovecraft Chapter 8: What is the Unnamable? H. P. Lovecraft and Problem of Evil Chapter 9: From Salem to Eastwick: Witchcraft in American Gothic Chapter 10: The City of Darkness: Fritz Leiber and Beginning of Modern Urban Horror Selected Bibliography Filmography About Author

Gothic Storytelling and Resistance in Charles W. Chesnutt'sThe Conjure Woman

This essay explores how Chesnutt uses gothic strategies to expose the historical contradictions of race and conjure up black-abject, revisiting the American gothic via Kristeva's concept of “the abject.” The Conjure Woman (1899) deploys gothic strategies to speak of the unspeakable experiences associated with slavery and contest the rationalist discourses that enforce and legitimate racism. Chesnutt's conjure stories reverse the “national process of forgetting” in the Reconstruction era to reintegrate the nation through the racially charged abjection process. His use of the gothic decisively reverses racist abjection through the juxtaposition of narratives between the former slave Julius and the Yankee investor John. Chesnutt's stories create a space of struggle between the oppressed and oppressor by summoning the abject that has been thrown off in the institution of Western hegemony. Julius's conjure stories wield the subversive power to challenge John and Annie, disrupt their binary thought, and instigate a form of multiple discourse. The Conjure Woman became a groundwork articulating the African-American presence through inarticulate gothic sounds and imagery, and has paved the road for later generations of African-American literature to continue to summon up the black-abject that has long been silenced and marginalized.1

A Companion to American Gothic

A Companion to American Gothic

The Walking Dead and Gothic Excess: The Decaying Social Structures of Contagion

The Walking Dead and Gothic Excess: The Decaying Social Structures of Contagion