Women's Colonial Gothic Writing, 1850-1930

Haunted Empire

Melissa Edmundson

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9783319769172
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

This book explores women writers' involvement with the Gothic. The author sheds new light on women's experience, a viewpoint that remains largely absent from male-authored Colonial Gothic works. The book investigates how women writers appropriated the Gothic genre—and its emphasis on fear, isolation, troubled identity, racial otherness, and sexual deviancy—in order to take these anxieties into the farthest realms of the British Empire. The chapters show how Gothic themes told from a woman's perspective emerge in unique ways when set in the different colonial regions that comprise the scope of this book: Canada, the Caribbean, Africa, India, Australia, and New Zealand. Edmundson argues that women's Colonial Gothic writing tends to be more critical of imperialism, and thereby more subversive, than that of their male counterparts. This book will be of interest to students and academics interested in women's writing, the Gothic, and colonial studies.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction: Reclaiming Women’s Colonial Gothic Writing
• 2. Susanna Moodie, Colonial Exiles, and the Frontier Canadian Gothic
• 3. Gothic Romance and Retribution in the Short Fiction of Isabella Valancy Crawford
• 4. Generations of the Female Vampire: Colonial Gothic Hybridity in Florence Marryat’s The Blood of the Vampire
• 5. Mary Kingsley and the Ghosts of West Africa
• 6. The African Stories of Margery Lawrence
• 7. Colonial Gothic Framework: Haunted Houses in the Anglo-Indian Ghost Stories of Bithia Mary Croker
• 8. Animal Gothic in Alice Perrin’s East of Suez
• 9. The Past Will Not Stay Buried: Female Bodies and Colonial Crime in the Australian Ghost Stories of Mary Fortune
• 10. Fear and Death in the Outback: Barbara Baynton’s Bush Studies
• 11. Katherine Mansfield and the Troubled Homes of Colonial New Zealand
• 12. Conclusion: “Cicatrice of an Old Wound”
• Back Matter