The Poetics and Politics of the American Gothic

Gender and Slavery in Nineteenth-Century American Literature

von

Monnet, Agnieszka Soltysik

TaschenbuchKartoniert, Paperback

174 Seiten

Englisch

Taylor & Franciserschienen am27.02.2017

Taking as its point of departure recent insights about the performative nature of genre, The Poetics and Politics of the American Gothic challenges the critical tendency to accept at face value that gothic literature is mainly about fear. Instead, Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet argues that the American Gothic, and gothic literature in general, is also about judgment: how to judge and what happens when judgment is confronted with situations that defy its limits. Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, Gilman, and James all shared a concern with the political and ideological debates of their time, but tended to approach these debates indirectly. Thus, Monnet suggests, while slavery and race are not the explicit subject matter of antebellum works by Poe and Hawthorne, they nevertheless permeate it through suggestive analogies and tacit references. Similarly, Melville, Gilman, and James use the gothic to explore the categories of gender and sexuality that were being renegotiated during the latter half of the century. Focusing on "The Fall of the House of Usher," The Marble Faun, Pierre, The Turn of the Screw, and "The Yellow Wallpaper," Monnet brings to bear minor texts by the same authors that further enrich her innovative readings of these canonical works. At the same time, her study persuasively argues that the Gothic's endurance and ubiquity are in large part related to its being uniquely adapted to rehearse questions about judgment and justice that continue to fascinate and disturb.mehr

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KlappentextTaking as its point of departure recent insights about the performative nature of genre, The Poetics and Politics of the American Gothic challenges the critical tendency to accept at face value that gothic literature is mainly about fear. Instead, Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet argues that the American Gothic, and gothic literature in general, is also about judgment: how to judge and what happens when judgment is confronted with situations that defy its limits. Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, Gilman, and James all shared a concern with the political and ideological debates of their time, but tended to approach these debates indirectly. Thus, Monnet suggests, while slavery and race are not the explicit subject matter of antebellum works by Poe and Hawthorne, they nevertheless permeate it through suggestive analogies and tacit references. Similarly, Melville, Gilman, and James use the gothic to explore the categories of gender and sexuality that were being renegotiated during the latter half of the century. Focusing on "The Fall of the House of Usher," The Marble Faun, Pierre, The Turn of the Screw, and "The Yellow Wallpaper," Monnet brings to bear minor texts by the same authors that further enrich her innovative readings of these canonical works. At the same time, her study persuasively argues that the Gothic's endurance and ubiquity are in large part related to its being uniquely adapted to rehearse questions about judgment and justice that continue to fascinate and disturb.

ZusammenfassungChallenging the widely held assumption that gothic literature is mainly about fear, Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet argues that the American Gothic, and gothic literature in general, is also about judgment. Analyzing canonical works by Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, Gilman, and James, Monnet persuasively argues that these authors' concerns about slavery, gender, and sexuality tacitly inform works that deal explicitly with less controversial subjects.

Details

ISBN/GTIN978-1-138-26056-6

ProduktartTaschenbuch

EinbandartKartoniert, Paperback

Verlag

Taylor & Francis

Erscheinungsjahr2017

Erscheinungsdatum27.02.2017

Seiten174 Seiten

SpracheEnglisch

Gewicht277 g

Artikel-Nr.42616525

Rubriken

GenreGeschichte/Politik

Inhalt/Kritik

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Contents: Introduction; Unreliable narrators and 'unnatural sensations': irony and conscience in Edgar Allan Poe; 'Everywhere ... a cross - and nastiness at the foot of it': history, ethics, and slavery in Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Marble Faun; 'Thy catching nobleness unsexes me, my brother': queer knowledge in Herman Melville's Pierre; 'I was queer company enough - quite as queer as the company I received': the queer Gothic of Henry James and Charlotte Perkins Gilman; Bibliography; Index.mehr