The Cambridge Companion to American Gothic

Like the very recent book American Gothic Culture: An Edinburgh Companion (Faflak & Haslam, 2016) (RR 2017/043), this new volume makes bold claims for the Gothic, an amorphous, fluid and contested mode. In his introduction, editor Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock, a Literature Professor at Central Michigan University, states that the entire literary tradition of what is now the USA “is at its core a Gothic one” (p. 1), despite the roots of Gothic being in the older and specifically European twin experiences of medievalism and reaction against the Enlightenment. This introductory essay explicates the book’s key premise –...