American Gothic Culture: An Edinburgh Companion

This fourth volume in the Edinburgh Companions to the Gothic series, which began with the previously reviewed The Victorian Gothic (Smith and Hughes, 2015) (RR 2015/062), is compact, yet hugely ambitious in scope. As with their counterparts in Europe, “gothic” works created by European settlers or their descendants in in the New World represented a reaction to Enlightenment rationalism, but the term “gothic” has itself been fluid; the meanings of this mode are much-contested. Taking as canvass the vast creative output of what is now the USA over the past two centuries, this book’s editors aim to...