Property and Power in English Gothic Literature

Ruth Bienstock Anolik teaches at Villanova University and writes extensively on the Gothic mode. Her articles have been published in Modern Language Studies, Studies in Jewish Literature,, and other journals and collections.

Table of Contents


Acknowledgments

Introduction. Possessions: Property and Propriety in the English Gothic Mode

Part I. Castle and Moat: Property Possession in the English Gothic

1. Slippery Properties: The Castle of Otranto and The Old English Baron

2. A Century of Loss: Historical Contexts for Property Anxieties

3. Fantasies of Return: Property Restoration Imagined

4. ­Nineteenth-Century Expansions

Part II. Ghosts: Possession of Person in the English Gothic

5. Self-(Dis)Possession in The Woman in White

6. Dispossessions of the Mind and the Body: A Gothic Tropology

7. The Double and the Ghost: Refusals of Self-(Dis)Possession

8. Resurrection Fantasies: Defying Death’s Dispossessions

9. Slavery and Marriage: Gothic Reflections of Political Rhetoric

10. Missing Mothers and Suppressed Sisters: The Dangers of Primogeniture

Part III. Fragmented Stories; Appropriated Voices: Possession of the Narrative in the English Gothic

11. Gothic Conventions; Narrative Dispossessions

12. Contexts of Contested Narratives: Can the Text Be Possessed?

13. The Theology of Narrative Dispossession in Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer

14. Dispossessed and Dispossessing: The Wandering Jew’s Possession of Voice and Narrative

Part IV. Beyond the End: Dispossessing Closure

15. “It is only the theory I want”: Repossessing Fiction in Sarah Waters’s Affinity

16. The Political Fantastic

Conclusion. Toward a Transatlantic Investigation: Possession and Dispossession in American Gothic Literature

Chapter Notes

Bibliography

Index