1st Edition
Rethinking Gothic Transgressions of Gender and Sexuality New Directions in Gothic Studies
From early examples of queer representation in mainstream media to present-day dissolutions of the human-nature boundary, the Gothic is always concerned with delineating and transgressing the norms that regulate society and speak to our collective fears and anxieties.
This volume examines British and American Gothic texts from four centuries and diverse media – including novels, films, podcasts, and games – in case studies which outline the central relationship between the Gothic and transgression, particularly gender(ed) and sexual transgression. This relationship is both crucial and constantly shifting, ever in the process of renegotiation, as transgression defines the Gothic and society redefines transgression. The case studies draw on a combination of well-studied and under-studied texts in order to arrive at a more comprehensive picture of transgression in the Gothic.
Pointing the way forward in Gothic Studies, this original and nuanced combination of gendered, Ecogothic, queer, and media critical approaches addresses established and new scholars of the Gothic alike.
Acknowledgements
Content Warnings
List of Contributors
Introduction: Gothic and Transgression
Part I: Gothic in the Long Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries
Chapter 1 .Excessive fainting and parodic bending: Analysing socio-political criticism through the heroine’s body in the Gothic novel and the Gothic parody. Kerstin-Anja Münderlein
Chapter 2 The Comfort of the Male Gaze in Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend. Franziska Quabeck
Chapter 3 Gothic Monster or Creative Muse? Strategies of Empowerment in Grace King’s “One of Us”. Alycia Garbay
Chapter 4 From Gothic Heroines to Monstrous Prom Queens: Gender Horror in Dracula and Jennifer’s Body. Kit Schuster
Chapter 5 Violet Strange: Gothic Girl Detective. Keli Masten
Part II: Gothic from the World Wars to the Present
Chapter 6 “I Don’t Want to Grow Up:” Abject Adolescence and Southern Gothic in Carson McCullers’s Short Stories. Jerneja Planinsek-Zlof
Chapter 7 The Unspeakable Plant – Gender, Desire and the Monstrous Vegetal in Frances Hardinge’s The Lie Tree. Anja Höing
Chapter 8 ‘Annihilation’ of the Gendered Human: Ecogothic Transgressions of Anthropocentrism. Tamara Schmitt and Maria Weber
Chapter 9 Transgressing Genre and Gender: Masculinities and (Post)Feminism in Neo-Gothic Narratives. Miriam Borham-Puyal
Chapter 10 “But it seems to me that I have absorbed Ruth” – Gothic Doubles in Laura Purcell’s The Corset. Lara Brändle
Chapter 11 Archive of the Unspeakable: Unsilencing Violence in Carmen Maria Machado’s In the Dream House. Carolin Jesussek
Chapter 12 Narrating the (Queer) Gothic in The Magnus Archives Podcast. Maria Juko
Chapter 13 The Wholesome Queer Gothic: Transgressing Narrative Norms and Shifting LGBTQIA+ Representation in Contemporary Re-Inventions of the Gothic. Sarah Faber
Conclusion: Gothic Prospects: Ancient Monsters and New Anxieties
Index
Biography
Sarah Faber’s central research areas are Game Studies, the fantastic, and nineteenth-century British literature, united by an overarching interest in narrative technique and constructions of (especially queer and/or gendered) identity and belonging. She completed her studies at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, where she wrote her doctoral thesis on narration in multiplayer games. She was a research and teaching associate at JGU Mainz for five years and a fellow at Brandenburg University of Applied Sciences for two. She has been a board member of the German Association for Research in the Fantastic since 2022.
Kerstin-Anja Münderlein is a lecturer and post-doc at the Institute of English and American Studies (Department of English Literature) at the University of Bamberg where she completed her PhD on Gothic parody in 2019. Her fields of research include Gothic novels and parodies of the long eighteenth century with a focus on quixotism and normative femininity, British poetry of the Great War (especially Vera Brittain’s writings), and the constructions of femininities and masculinities in English Golden Age crime fiction. Her methodological focus lies on Gender Studies, audience, and reception theory. She is assistant editor for Crime Fiction Studies and currently edits a themed issue on gender and crime for the journal. Her most recent publications include Genre and Reception in the Gothic Parody: Framing the Subversive Heroine (Routledge, 2022) and the edited collection Crime Fiction, Femininities and Masculinities (forthcoming 2024).
