This book begins with the assumption that the presence of non-human creatures causes an always-already uncanny rift in human assumptions about reality. Exploring the dark side of animal nature and the ‘otherness’ of animals as viewed by humans, and employing cutting-edge theory on non-human animals, eco-criticism, literary and cultural theory, this book takes the Gothic genre into new territory. After the dissemination of Darwin’s theories of evolution, nineteenth-century fiction quickly picked up on the idea of the ‘animal within’. Here, the fear explored was of an unruly, defiant, degenerate and entirely amoral animality lying (mostly) dormant within all of us. However, non-humans and humans have other sorts of encounters, too, and even before Darwin, humans have often had an uneasy relationship with animals, which, as Donna Haraway puts it, have a way of ‘looking back’ at us. In this book, the focus is not on the ‘animal within’ but rather on the animal ‘with-out’: other and entirely incomprehensible.
Author(s): Ruth Heholt, Melissa Edmundson
Series: Palgrave Studies In Animals And Literature
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Year: 2020
Language: English
Pages: 317
Tags: Gothic Fiction, Gothic Animals
Front Matter ....Pages i-xix
Introduction (Ruth Heholt, Melissa Edmundson)....Pages 1-17
Front Matter ....Pages 19-19
‘Like a Madd Dogge’: Demonic Animals and Animal Demoniacs in Early Modern English Possession Narratives (Brendan C. Walsh)....Pages 21-39
‘Most Hideous of Gaolers’: The Spider in Ernest G. Henham’s Tenebrae (Paul Benedict Grant)....Pages 41-55
Devouring the Animal Within: Uncanny Otherness in Richard Adams’s The Plague Dogs (Anja Höing)....Pages 57-74
Hunted, Now Haunting: The Thylacine as a Gothic Symbol in Julia Leigh’s The Hunter (Alex Philp)....Pages 75-90
‘What Do I Use to Make Them Afraid?’: The Gothic Animal and the Problem of Legitimacy in American Superhero Comics (Fred Francis)....Pages 91-106
Imagining the Becoming-Unextinct of Megalodon: Spectral Animals, Digital Resurrection, and the Vanishing of the Human (Michael Fuchs)....Pages 107-123
Front Matter ....Pages 125-125
‘Rats Is Bogies I Tell You, and Bogies Is Rats’: Rats, Repression, and the Gothic Mode (Matthew Crofts, Janine Hatter)....Pages 127-140
At Home with Miniature Sea-Monsters: Philip Henry Gosse, Charles Kingsley, and ‘The Great Unknown’ (Sue Edney)....Pages 141-158
Uncanny Snails: Patricia Highsmith and the Allure of the Gastropods (Fiona Peters)....Pages 159-171
‘I Have Flyophobia’: Jane Rice’s ‘The Idol of the Flies’ and Evil as Unwanted Houseguest (Kevin Knott)....Pages 173-186
‘Encircled by Minute, Evilly-Intentioned Airplanes’: The Uncanny Biopolitics of Robotic Bees (Franciska Cettl)....Pages 187-204
Front Matter ....Pages 205-205
A Bark and Stormy Night: Ann Radcliffe’s Animals (Heather Ladd)....Pages 207-222
Hellish Horses and Monstrous Men: Gothic Horsemanship in Washington Irving and Edgar Allan Poe (Kirstin A. Mills)....Pages 223-240
The Colonial Idol, the Animalistic, and the New Woman in the Imperial Gothic of Richard Marsh (Shuhita Bhattacharjee)....Pages 241-256
Victor Hugo’s Pieuvre and the Marine EcoGothic (Natalie Deam)....Pages 257-272
The Human Within and the Animal Without?: Rats and Mr Bunnsy in Terry Pratchett’s The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents (Rebecca Lloyd)....Pages 273-289
Companion Animals in Contemporary Scottish Women’s Gothic (Timothy C. Baker)....Pages 291-306
Back Matter ....Pages 307-310
