Ecogothic in Nineteenth-Century American Literature

Dawn Keetley is Professor of English at Lehigh University, author of　Making a Monster: Jesse Pomeroy, the Boy Murderer of 1870s Boston (University of Massachusetts Press, 2017), and co-editor of　Plant Horror: Approaches to the Monstrous Vegetal in Fiction and Film　(Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). Matthew Wynn Sivils is professor of English at Iowa State University and the author of American Environmental Fiction, 1782-1847 (Ashgate/Routledge, 2014).

Table of Contents

Abstracts v

Introduction: Approaches to the Ecogothic

Dawn Keetley and Matthew Wynn Sivils 1

1. "Perverse Nature": Anxieties of Animality and Environment in Charles Brockden Brown’s

Edgar Huntly

Tom J. Hillard 33

2. "A Heap of Ruins": The Horrors of Deforestation in Leonora Sansay’s Secret History

Lisa M. Vetere 58

3. "The Earth was Groaning and Shaking": Landscapes of Slavery in The History of Mary Prince

Amanda Stuckey 80

4. "Give me my skin": William J. Snelling’s "A Night in the Woods" (1836) and the Gothic

Accusation against Buffalo Extinction

Jimmy L. Bryan Jr. 103

5. Failures to Signify: Poe’s Uncanny Animal Others

Kate Huber 130

6. Gothic Materialisms: Experimenting with Fire and Water in Edgar Allan Poe’s Tales of

(Im)mortality

Liz Hutter 152

7. "The Birth-Mark," "Rappaccini’s Daughter," and the Ecogothic

Lesley Ginsberg 180

8. Ghoulish Hinterlands: Ecogothic Confrontations in American Slave Narratives

Jericho Williams 212

9. Bleeding Feet and Failing Knees: The Ecogothic in Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Chasing Ice

Cari M. Carpenter 232

10. Vegetal Haunting: The Gothic Plant in Nineteenth-Century American Fiction

Matthew Wynn Sivils 253

11. Ecogothic Extinction Fiction: The Extermination of the Alaskan Mammoth

Jennifer Schell 275

12. Hyperobjects and the End of the World: Elemental Antagonists of American Naturalism

Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock 299

13. "Two Distinct Worlds"? Maintaining and Transgressing Boundaries of the HumAnimal in

Thomas Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon

Michael Fuchs 322

Contributor Biographies 346