This volume is a study of human entanglements with Nature as seen through the mode of haunting. As an interruption of the present by the past, haunting can express contemporary anxieties concerning our involvement in the transformation of natural environments and their ecosystems, and our complicity in their collapse. It can also express a much-needed sense of continuity and relationality. The complexity of the question―who and what gets to be called human with respect to the nonhuman―is reflected in these collected chapters, which, in their analysis of cinematic and literary representations of sentient Nature within the traditional gothic trope of haunting, bring together history, race, postcolonialism, and feminism with ecocriticism and media studies. Given the growing demand for narratives expressing our troubled relationship with Nature, it is imperative to analyze this contested ground.
Author(s): Sladja Blazan
Series: Palgrave Gothic
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Year: 2021
Language: English
Pages: 212
City: Cham
Acknowledgments
Contents
Notes on Contributors
List of Figures
Chapter 1: Haunting and Nature: An Introduction
Haunting
Nature
Anthropocene/Capitalocene/Chthulucene and the Ecogothic
Trajectory
Works Cited
Chapter 2: Microgothic: Microbial Aesthetics of Haunted Nature
The Origins of the Microgothic
“All monstrous, all prodigious things”: William Heath’s “Monster Soup”
“[P]rofoundly vicious, treacherous and malignant”: Mark Twain’s Three Thousand Years Among the Microbes
The Microbiome and Its Epistemological and Aesthetic Challenges in BioArt
“And I held it in my hand, the most terrifying of all ills”: Anna Dumitriu’s The Bacterial Sublime
Conclusion: The Persistence of the Microgothic
Works Cited
Chapter 3: Black Mold, White Extinction: I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House, The Haunting of Hill House, “Gray Matter,” and H. P. Lovecraft’s “The Shunned House”
Black Mold and Post-Death Existence
White Post-Death
Climate Crisis, Extinction Fears
Black Growth, White Extinction
Black Mold, Black Slavery
Works Cited
Chapter 4: Vegetomorphism: Exploring the Material Within the Aesthetics of the EcoGothic in Stranger Things and Annihilation
The Vegetation Belt
The Monstrous Root
Human Phytographia and Vegetomorphism
Indigenous Roots of Chthonic Monsters in Popular Culture
Works Cited
Chapter 5: An Ecology of Abject Women: Frontier Gothicism and Ecofeminism in Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle
Introduction: Frontier Realism, Gothic Symbolism, and Ecological Feminism
Frontier Aesthetics and Ecofeminist Politics in We Have Always Lived in the Castle
Conclusion: Haunted Natures in the Twenty-First Century
Works Cited
Chapter 6: Alligators in the Living Room: Terror and Horror in the Capitalocene
Introduction
(Representing) Capitalocene Violence in the Global North and South
Gothic and Horror in the Capitalocene: Crawl
Conclusion
Works Cited
Chapter 7: Haunted Technonature: Anthropocene Coloniality in Ng Yi-Sheng’s Lion City
Singapore and Anthropocene Hegemony
Uncanny Technonature
Singapore, Crisis, and Environmental Management
Coloniality and the Capitalocene
Haunting the Anthropocene
Irrealist Aetiologies
Decolonizing Emergency
Works Cited
Chapter 8: Haunted Nature, Haunted Humans: Intelligent Trees, Gaia, and the Apocalypse Meme
Intelligent Trees and Haunted Nature
Apocalyptic Endings and Haunted Humans
Works Cited
Chapter 9: The Global Poltergeist: COVID-19 Hauntings
Works Cited
Index
