American Culture Studies

The Intrinsic Raciality of the American Gothic

Corinna Lenhardt

• Publisher: transcript Verlag
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9783839451540
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The American Gothic novel has been deeply shaped by issues of race and raciality from its origins in British Romanticism to the American Gothic novel in the twenty-first century. Savage Horrors delineates an intrinsic raciality that is discursively sedimented in the Gothic's uniquely binary structure. Corinna Lenhardt uncovers the destructive and lasting impact of the Gothic's anti-Black racism on the cultural discourses in the United States. At the same time, Savage Horrors traces the unflinching Black resistance back to the Gothic's intrinsic raciality. The African American Gothic, however, does not originate there but in the Black Atlantic - roughly a decade before the first Gothic novel was ever written on American soil.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• PART I:The Gothic and the Savage Villain/Civil Hero Gotheme
• PART II:The Savage Villain/Civil Hero Gotheme: WASP Origins and Iterations
• PART III:“You say I am wilderness. I am”—Black Origins and African American Reiterations
• Epilogue: The American Gothic, Raciality, and the Possibility of Reiterative “Unthought”
• Works Cited