Transplantation Gothic

Transplantation is a boundary practice unsettling distinctions between self and other, life and death. This book identifies a Gothic mode in representations of the practice in literature, film and science from the nineteenth century to the present, considering hybrid bodies and precarious lives under neoliberal late capitalism. -- .

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Winner of the International Gothic Association's Allan Lloyd Smith Prize 2022.
Shortlisted for the British Society of Literature and Science Book Prize 2020.

Transplantation Gothic is a shadow cultural history of transplantation, as mediated through medical writing, science fiction, life writing and visual arts in a Gothic mode, from the nineteenth-century to the present. The works explore the experience of donor/suppliers, recipients and practitioners, and simultaneously express transfer-related suffering and are complicit in its erasure. Examining texts from Europe, North America and India, the book resists exoticising predatorial tissue economies and considers fantasies of harvest as both product and symbol of structural ruination under neoliberal capitalism. In their efforts to articulate bioengineered hybridity, these works are not only anxious but speculative. The book will be of interest to academics and students researching Gothic studies, science fiction, critical medical humanities and cultural studies of transplantation. -- .