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