This groundbreaking study analyzes the development of American gothic  literature alongside nineteenth-century discourses of passing and  racial ambiguity. By bringing together these areas of analysis, Justin Edwards  considers the following questions. How are the categories of “race” and  the rhetoric of racial difference tied to the language of gothicism?  What can these discursive ties tell us about a range of social  boundaries—gender, sexuality, class, race, etc.—during the nineteenth  century? What can the construction and destabilization of these social  boundaries tell us about the development of the U.S. gothic? The sources used to address these questions are diverse, often  literary and historical, fluidly moving between “representation” and  “reality.” Works of gothic literature by Edgar Allan Poe, Herman  Melville, Frances Harper, and Charles Chesnutt, among others, are placed  in the contexts of nineteenth-century racial “science” and contemporary  discourses about the formation of identity. Edwards then examines how  nineteenth-century writers gothicized biracial and passing figures in  order to frame them within the rubric of a “demonization of difference.”  By charting such depictions in literature and popular science, he  focuses on an obsession in antebellum and postbellum America over the  threat of collapsing racial identities—threats that resonated strongly  with fears of the transgression of the boundaries of sexuality and the  social anxiety concerning the instabilities of gender, class, ethnicity,  and nationality. Gothic Passages not only builds upon the work of  Americanists who uncover an underlying racial element in U.S. gothic  literature but also sheds new light on the pervasiveness of gothic  discourse in nineteenth-century representations of passing from both  sides of the color line. This fascinating book will be of interest to  scholars of American literature, cultural studies, and African American  studies.

Gothic Passages: Racial Ambiguity and the American Gothic PDF

The list of books you might like