STUDIES IN AMERICAN FICTION最新文献

{"title":"Consuming Monsters: Borderlands Ecogothic Science Fiction in Tears of the Trufflepig","authors":"Ana María Mutis","doi":"10.1353/saf.2023.a923100","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/saf.2023.a923100","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> Consuming Monsters: <span>Borderlands Ecogothic Science Fiction in <em>Tears of the Trufflepig</em></span> <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Ana María Mutis<sup>1</sup> (bio) </li> </ul> <p><strong>F</strong>rom its origins in the eighteenth century, gothic literature has deployed horror and the supernatural to manifest anxieties over a wide range of invisible threats, such as technological and scientific progress; past and present forms of colonialism; and, more recently, environmental crisis. As Kelly Hurley explains, the gothic is “a cyclical genre that reemerges in times of cultural stress in order to negotiate anxieties for its readership by working through them in displaced (sometimes supernaturalized) form.”<sup>2</sup> Monsters, specifically, are said to embody these fears, as they are designed, like their name suggests, to reveal and warn.<sup>3</sup> Accordingly, monsters are “the ultimate incorporation of our anxieties—about history, about identity, about our very humanity.”<sup>4</sup> Thus, as Jeffrey Jerome Cohen asserts, cultures and specific cultural moments can be read through the monsters they engender.<sup>5</sup></p> <p>Mexican and Chicanx writers and filmmakers have captured the anxieties around the militarized U.S.-Mexican border, along with the harmful social impact of neoliberalism and globalized capitalism in the borderlands, through what Micah K. Donohue has termed “borderlands gothic science fiction.”<sup>6</sup> Films such as <em>Sleep Dealer</em> (2008), directed by Alex Rivera, and the novels <em>Lunar Braceros 2125–2148</em> (2009) and <em>Keep Me Posted: Logins from Tomorrow</em> (2020), both jointly authored by Rosaura Sánchez and Beatriz Pita, are examples of this genre. In the intersection of borderlands science fiction and cybergothic literature and film, monsters emerge in the shape of robots, cyborgs, and digital phantoms to warn us of a dystopian future when migrant workers’ exploitation and dehumanization result from transnational capitalism.</p> <p>This essay aims to expand the work on borderlands gothic science fiction into what I have termed borderlands ecogothic science fiction. While scholarship on borderlands <strong>[End Page 189]</strong> science fiction has prioritized how this genre depicts and problematizes human life and labor under transnational capitalism, my analytical framework is aimed at also exploring nonhuman beings and ecosystems as integral to the concerns addressed by this form of fiction. Drawing from critical studies on ecocriticism and gothic literature, specifically the “alimentary gothic” genre, I propose an examination of the environmental aspects of the novel <em>Tears of the Trufflepig</em> (2019) by Fernando A. Flores, and argue that through the alimentary gothic elements in this novel—and particularly through the figure of the zombie—<em>Tears of the Truffl","PeriodicalId":42494,"journal":{"name":"STUDIES IN AMERICAN FICTION","volume":"163 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-03-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140323903","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"On Ruination, Slavery, and the American Landscape in Conjure Women","authors":"Madelyn Walsh","doi":"10.1353/saf.2023.a923101","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/saf.2023.a923101","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> On Ruination, Slavery, and the American Landscape in <em>Conjure Women</em> <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Madelyn Walsh (bio) </li> </ul> <blockquote> <p>The rot remains with us, the men are gone.</p> Derek Walcott, “Ruins of a Great House”<sup>1</sup> </blockquote> <p><strong>I</strong>n an ecogothic reading, Afia Atakora’s novel <em>Conjure Women</em> (2020) narrates the relationship between the American landscape as an ecological space and the horrors of transatlantic slavery for freed communities that continue to reside on the site of their enslavement.<sup>2</sup> In the transatlantic trade of enslaved African people, we can identify a socioecological catastrophe that altered the human relationship with the land through the use of unfree and dehumanized labor as part of agricultural practice. As Margo DeMello asserts, “a system of racial inequality emerged to justify a system of economic greed, and to reconcile the practice of inequality alongside of a philosophy of equality for all.”<sup>3</sup> The American plantation landscape became a site of slavery the enslaved were bound to, creating a perverse intimacy between the enslaved community and the land. The devastating impact enslavement had on the African American relationship with nature is best explored by Kimberly K. Smith. She asserts that transatlantic slavery provides an ambivalent legacy for African Americans when they are negotiating a relationship with nature, because “the slave system forced slaves into an intimacy with the natural environment but also tended to alienate them from it.”<sup>4</sup> Thus, a seemingly binding paradox emerges, whereby the African American relationship with the natural environment is defined by the slave system. The plantation setting acts as a microcosm through which to understand the ecological relationship between humans and nature as shaped by this system. This study therefore examines the socioecological relationship between the enslaved <strong>[End Page 209]</strong> community and the natural environment in the plantation landscape in <em>Conjure</em> by analyzing ruins in the novel. Through this examination, we might begin to conceive of what Graham Huggan and Helen Tiffin describe as a “burgeoning alliance” between postcolonial studies and environmental studies by drawing together and analyzing the relationship between the enslaved and the land to which they were bound through an ecogothic lens.<sup>5</sup> This is a notable move away from the stereotypical association of ecology and ecocriticism with “pastoral and romantic representations of certain kinds of nature: the distant, pristine, and revered pastures and forests, rather than the urban rivers, the farm factories, or the cityscapes.”<sup>6</sup> It is at this point of division from classic ecocriticism that the ecogothic provides the lens needed to analyze this p","PeriodicalId":42494,"journal":{"name":"STUDIES IN AMERICAN FICTION","volume":"130 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-03-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140323599","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"\"We live below sea level\": Layered Ecologies and Regional Gothic in Karen Russell's Swamplandia!","authors":"Patrick Whitmarsh","doi":"10.1353/saf.2023.a923098","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/saf.2023.a923098","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> “We live below sea level”: <span>Layered Ecologies and Regional Gothic in Karen Russell’s <em>Swamplandia!</em></span> <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Patrick Whitmarsh (bio) </li> </ul> <blockquote> <p>The swamp is like the true uncanny. It’s neither land nor water. You can’t get your bearings there.</p> —Karen Russell, in conversation with David Naimon<sup>1</sup> </blockquote> <h2>“This whole swamp is haunted”: Reading the Ecogothic in <em>Swamplandia!</em></h2> <p><strong>I</strong>n Karen Russell’s <em>Swamplandia!</em> (2011), the underworld is not a distant realm of myth but a spectral world emerging in the wetlands of South Florida. The novel depicts the trials and tribulations of the gator-wrestling Bigtree family after the death of their matriarch, Hilola. Through the experiences of the family’s youngest member, Ava Bigtree, Russell gives her readers a mesmerizing, enchanting, and often deeply unsettling tour through southwest Florida’s Ten Thousand Islands, located in Collier and Monroe Counties (rendered as the fictional Loomis County in the novel). <em>Swamplandia!</em> can comprehensively be described as a bildungsroman, exploring the ruination of childhood fantasies as the Bigtree siblings struggle to find meaning and mooring after their mother’s death and father’s subsequent abandonment; yet this categorization is also slightly reductive. Although she deploys components of the bildungsroman, Russell complicates the novel’s coming-of-age narrative with flourishes of less realist storytelling modes: environmental weirdness, wisps of magical realism, and a feverish, sticky swamp-gothic in which the landscape conceals treacherous histories and nonhuman dangers. Drawing together details of a specific locale with a dark inflection, <em>Swamplandia!</em> undercuts the linearity of <strong>[End Page 143]</strong> the traditional bildungsroman, muddying the stream of human growth with eddies of ecological complexity in the recalcitrant depths of the Florida swamp.</p> <p>The presence of subsurface worlds is a theme that recurs in much of Russell’s fiction. In “Bog Girl: A Romance” (2016), protagonist Cillian Eddowis unearths and falls in love with a woman preserved in a peat bog on an island in Europe. In “The Bad Graft” (2014), a couple treks into Joshua Tree National Park, witnessing mirages of “evaporated civilizations, dissolved castles that lay buried under the desert.”<sup>2</sup> And in “The Graveless Doll of Eric Mutis” (2010), a group of teenagers who meet in a New Jersey park toss an uncanny scarecrow into an eroded ravine, perplexed as its limbs begin to disappear mysteriously. In Russell’s distinctly twenty-first-century brand of gothic fiction, in which characters are beset or otherwise affected by the repercussions of twentieth-century industrialization, the earth below our feet mobilizes an ecological per","PeriodicalId":42494,"journal":{"name":"STUDIES IN AMERICAN FICTION","volume":"45 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-03-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140323864","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Empires of Extraction: Silver Field Ecologies and Eugenics in Silvia Moreno-Garcia's Mexican Gothic","authors":"Colleen Marie Tripp","doi":"10.1353/saf.2023.a923102","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/saf.2023.a923102","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> Empires of Extraction: <span>Silver Field Ecologies and Eugenics in Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s <em>Mexican Gothic</em></span> <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Colleen Marie Tripp (bio) </li> </ul> <h2>Introduction</h2> <p><strong>I</strong>n her adaptation of the Victorian haunted house, Mexican Canadian author Silvia Moreno-Garcia explores the anthropocenic history of a nation that never felt quite at home in her postcolonial, ecogothic novel, <em>Mexican Gothic</em> (2020).<sup>1</sup> If the “postcolonial Gothic references the continuation of colonial violence and its legacies, rather than its haunting remainder,” Moreno-Garcia’s portrayal of a Victorian-style manor and mine subsumed by supernatural mushrooms reveals forms of eco-imperial monstrosity that challenge what should be local, familiar, and secure.<sup>2</sup> Set in the post-revolutionary 1950s, the novel begins with Mexico City socialite Noemí visiting her newly-wed cousin Catalina at High Place, an old Victorian manor and silver mine owned by the British Doyle family in rural, northern Mexico. The decaying home is “absolutely Victorian in construction,” and the interior is eerily evocative of the family’s adjacent silver fields: “It’s always damp and dark and so very cold,” Catalina comments.<sup>3</sup> At their nightly dinners, the Doyle family routinely contrasts topics of racial decay with its mine’s exhausted natural resources, echoing the degeneration discourses of the Victorian fin de siècle. Catalina’s husband, Virgil Doyle comments, “On occasion you need to inject new blood into the mix, so to speak” (237). Even more strangely, Noemí begins to see the moldy wallpaper of the home move, like that of the late nineteenth-century horror story “The Yellow Wallpaper,” and she experiences extra-sensory dreams of the home’s centuries-old, occluded histories and people (55). The narrator pithily concludes, “This house, she was sure, was haunted” (120). In the end, patriarch Howard Doyle reveals High Place’s Lovecraftian horrors: the <strong>[End Page 229]</strong> family has instrumentalized a supernatural mushroom colony (“the gloom”) to mentally colonize the home’s Mexican visitors and miners.<sup>4</sup> The Doyles control Mexicans using the mushroom gloom, from lower-class miners to the upper-class mestizas they court and wed, to sustain the future of their mine, racial lineage, and generational wealth. Mexican people and natural resources, in short, both serve the Doyles’ micro-extractive zone, an operation that depends on a future-depleting imperial episteme of slow violence and a supernatural mushroom gloom.<sup>5</sup></p> <p>Noemí’s fragmented dreams of the memories and occulted violence at High Place becomes an extended metaphor of the cultural experience and history of socioecological imperialism in Mexico and an important facet of Moreno-Garcia’s adaptati","PeriodicalId":42494,"journal":{"name":"STUDIES IN AMERICAN FICTION","volume":"2 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-03-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140323866","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Haunted Earth: Genre, Preservation, and Surviving the End of the World in Jeff VanderMeer's Hummingbird Salamander","authors":"Christy Tidwell","doi":"10.1353/saf.2023.a923103","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/saf.2023.a923103","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> Haunted Earth: <span>Genre, Preservation, and Surviving the End of the World in Jeff VanderMeer’s <em>Hummingbird Salamander</em></span> <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Christy Tidwell (bio) </li> </ul> <p><strong>I</strong>n the twenty-first century, the ecogothic is unavoidable. Environmental hauntings abound. Our daily weather becomes less predictable, and species go extinct at terrifying and unprecedented rates. The unpredictable and unprecedented have quickly become the new normal, however, and we adjust to the regularity of these losses and the ongoing threat of wildfires, floods, snowstorms, droughts. These environmental issues are the result of our own past actions, accompanied by the desire to preserve the world as we know it and the more pressing need to learn how to live with environmental change. We are haunted by our past—by what has been lost, what remains, and our responsibility for all of the above; we are also haunted by futures that have not yet come to pass.</p> <p>Jeff VanderMeer’s <em>Hummingbird Salamander</em> (2021), an ecogothic eco-thriller set in the present and near future, grapples with these hauntings and their consequences. A story about Jane Smith (not her real name), a security analyst, who gets pulled into a tangled mystery about ecoterrorism, taxidermy, and animal smuggling, <em>Hummingbird Salamander</em> explores Jane’s—and our—willful ignorance about climate change and the sixth mass extinction. As Jane searches for Silvina, mysterious ecoterrorist and activist, she also learns more about the changes to the planet or, more accurately, begins to notice those changes that she has previously been comfortable enough to ignore. A familiar reality hovers in the background of the central conspiracy thriller plot—“Wildfires had consumed states in the heartland. Cyclones another. Earthquakes from fracking were omnipresent. Oil spills from pipelines that didn’t bear thinking about. Pandemic, a rumor gathering strength.”<sup>1</sup>—reiterating the familiarity of the world, the severity of the environmental issues, and the way that such problems are easily ignored. Over the course <strong>[End Page 253]</strong> of the book (just as in the reader’s life), these changes become more commonplace until, Jane speculates, “Maybe we wouldn’t even notice it, after a while. Maybe we wouldn’t remember it had been different, until the next thing that happened to us. Until it killed us” (276). Like ghosts, these environmental hauntings are both existentially threatening and indeterminate, something you could look right through.</p> <p>This sense of haunting marks <em>Hummingbird Salamander</em> as an ecogothic novel. Although often associated with Nature-strikes-back narratives, fears of the natural world,<sup>2</sup> and ecophobia (“an irrational and groundless hatred of the natural world”<sup>3</sup>), the eco","PeriodicalId":42494,"journal":{"name":"STUDIES IN AMERICAN FICTION","volume":"16 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-03-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140323878","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Introduction: The Proliferation of the Ecogothic","authors":"Matthew Wynn Sivils","doi":"10.1353/saf.2023.a923091","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/saf.2023.a923091","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> Introduction: <span>The Proliferation of the Ecogothic</span> <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Matthew Wynn Sivils (bio) </li> </ul> <p><strong>T</strong>he ecogothic probes the dark and earthy unknowns of the literary landscape, upending creekside stones and dipping dirty fingernails into feculent pools—ever reaching for some mysterious, quivering thing. As the name implies, this still-nascent critical approach explores the interpretive possibilities found at the junction between traditional gothic literary study and the array of methodologies and concerns that comprise the environmental humanities.</p> <p>Indeed, gothic anxieties haunt some of our most environmentally focused works of literature, and conversely, non-human elements emerge, often in disturbing ways, in texts more conventionally placed under the label of the gothic. Once we start looking, the ecogothic seems to sprout up everywhere, proliferating across texts like mushrooms after a spring rain, an ever-present literary lifeform hidden just beneath the surface. It glows in the eyes of <em>Edgar Huntly</em>’s panthers; it joins in the din of “waddling fungus growths [that] shriek with derision!” from “The Yellow Wall-Paper”; and it rises into the tree-shaped whip scar upon Sethe’s back.<sup>1</sup> Possessed of an uncanny, fragmented omnipresence, the ecogothic looks back at us from across the page, “Like a tree / In which there are three blackbirds.”<sup>2</sup></p> <p>Early stirrings of ecogothic criticism appear in the work of scholars such as Jonathan Bate, Leslie Fiedler, and Yi-Fu Tuan, but for the most part this critical approach began to take shape in the mid-to-late 2000s. Critics such as Stacy Alaimo, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Simon C. Estok, Tom J. Hillard, Timothy Morton, Lee Rozelle, and others began to variously connect ecocriticism with the gothic, a literary mode that had, to that point, taken a back seat to more bucolic works of nature writing. Estok’s 2009 article “Theorizing in a Space of Ambivalent Openness: Ecocriticism and Ecophobia” proved especially influential in redirecting our focus toward the more terrifying aspects of the environmental <strong>[End Page 1]</strong> imagination. Defining ecophobia as “an irrational and groundless hatred of the natural world,” Estok argues it is “as present and subtle in our daily lives and literature as homophobia and racism and sexism.”<sup>3</sup> In this formulation, ecophobia is, at its core, about the human struggle for control over the non-human world and the terror and dread that arises when we fail to maintain that control. In an article from later that same year, Tom J. Hillard, building upon Estok’s ideas, further sets the stage when he contends, “Because Gothic literature is so obsessed with fears of all types, the Gothic provides a useful lens for understanding the ways that many authors—regardl","PeriodicalId":42494,"journal":{"name":"STUDIES IN AMERICAN FICTION","volume":"34 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-03-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140323881","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Ecologies of the Undead: George Saunders's Lincoln in the Bardo and the Limits of the Ecogothic","authors":"Eric Gary Anderson","doi":"10.1353/saf.2023.a923099","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/saf.2023.a923099","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> Ecologies of the Undead: <span>George Saunders’s <em>Lincoln in the Bardo</em> and the Limits of the Ecogothic</span> <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Eric Gary Anderson (bio) </li> </ul> <h2>Introduction: The Outer Limits</h2> <p><strong>“E</strong>coGothic” is, as Elizabeth Parker has written, a “fledgling term.”<sup>1</sup> Young as it is, it has already proven remarkably fruitful, in large part because it merges the open-endedness of ecocriticism with the ambiguities baked into gothic to describe an unsettling, elusive “ecocentric ambience” that has a long literary and cultural reach.<sup>2</sup> The ecogothic thus extends an American (and, as Parker argues, transnational) gothic that is itself capacious, “less a genre than a fluid, ubiquitous literary mode.”<sup>3</sup> Ecogothic studies is off to a quick start, with a dedicated scholarly journal, <em>Gothic Nature</em>; a monograph by the journal’s co-founder and co-editor, Parker; a collection of critical essays edited by Dawn Keetley and Matthew Wynn Sivils; and numerous journal articles and academic conferences. As Parker and co-editor Michelle Poland announce in the introduction to the second issue of <em>Gothic Nature</em>, published in 2021, “We live in ecoGothic times.”<sup>4</sup></p> <p>With this statement, Parker and Poland productively complicate the already formidable challenge of defining ecogothic by proposing that it encompasses not only grounded spatial locations—an old house in a dark forest, say—but also more abstract and more wide-ranging temporal coordinates. But what are “ecoGothic times?” What does it mean to view both space and time as both ecological and gothic? In his recent study of Anthropocene poetics, David Farrier points out that the Anthropocene by definition denotes human influence on physical environments and further posits that its “temporality . . . is <strong>[End Page 165]</strong> deeply menacing. Its breadth is bewildering.”<sup>5</sup> Farrier goes on to suggest that a vocabulary of ghosts and hauntings can help us wrap our minds around the vastness of the problem, the “unsettling” ways in which “our present is in fact accompanied by deep pasts and deep futures.”<sup>6</sup> Such arguments, with their attention to “the reciprocal relationship between life and nonlife,”<sup>7</sup> also drive the edited collection <em>Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet</em>, which is organized into sections on “Ghosts of the Anthropocene” and “Monsters of the Anthropocene.” The editors of this volume ask: “How can we get back to the pasts we need to see the present more clearly? We call this return to multiple pasts, human and not human, ‘ghosts.’ Every landscape is haunted by past ways of life” and, as if that is not enough eco-cultural spectrality, “anthropogenic landscapes are also haunted by imagined futures.”<sup>8</sup></p> <p>Such approaches r","PeriodicalId":42494,"journal":{"name":"STUDIES IN AMERICAN FICTION","volume":"44 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-03-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140323905","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"New England's Nineteenth-Century Ecogothic Nightmares: Bees and Rivers as Metaphors and Harbingers","authors":"Bridget M. Marshall","doi":"10.1353/saf.2023.a923093","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/saf.2023.a923093","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> New England’s Nineteenth-Century Ecogothic Nightmares: <span>Bees and Rivers as Metaphors and Harbingers</span> <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Bridget M. Marshall<sup>1</sup> (bio) </li> </ul> <p><strong>I</strong>n <em>The Domestic Manners of the Americans</em> (1832), Frances Trollope describes an emerging industrial city in the U.S. as a “battleground” where the “demon of machinery” fought “the peaceful realms of nature” and where “as fast as half a dozen trees were cut down, a factory was raised up; stumps still contest the ground with pillars, and porticos are seen to struggle with rocks.”<sup>2</sup> By her account, even as the signs of industrial ventures spread, the ground was still contested in an ongoing struggle between the earth and human industrial interventions. Such literary portrayals of industrialization as a battle waged between an innocent, doomed natural environment and a relentless human drive for progress are filled with imagery and metaphors that reveal an essentially gothic relationship between humans and the natural world; further, such portrayals anticipate gothic nightmares of ecological collapse. Gothic criticism has long understood the importance of the environment to gothic texts; Allan Lloyd-Smith has identified a key theme in American gothic literature as the “terror of the land itself, its emptiness, its implacability; simply a sense of its vast, lonely, and possibly hostile space.”<sup>3</sup> Particularly over the past fifteen years, scholars have been using a specifically <em>eco</em>gothic lens to draw our attention to the importance of such depictions in light of the increasingly grim reality of climate change’s impacts on the planet and human life. Lloyd-Smith argues that “landscapes in the Gothic . . . dwelt on the exposed, inhuman and pitiless nature of mountains, crags, and wastelands,”<sup>4</sup> but an ecogothic approach reveals that what is “exposed, inhuman and pitiless” is not so much the natural world, but its destruction by human undertakings.</p> <p>The landscape of America’s New England region in particular has long been a source of gothic terrors, including mysterious flora, fauna, and forests, and horrifying <strong>[End Page 31]</strong> histories, such as the extirpation of Indigenous Peoples and the persecution of so-called “witches.”<sup>5</sup> There certainly were (and are still) plenty of dark tales that emerged from or were buried in the soil of New England. But in the nineteenth century, a new fear surfaced in New England as the region became the site of industrial ventures that would consume endless natural resources and devastate local ecosystems.<sup>6</sup> Many works by both well-known and now unknown nineteenth-century writers portray anxieties about once pristine New England landscapes that were obliterated by factories and mills. As cities like Lowell, Mas","PeriodicalId":42494,"journal":{"name":"STUDIES IN AMERICAN FICTION","volume":"12 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-03-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140323872","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Madness of Mold: Ecogothic in Nathaniel Hawthorne's The House of the Seven Gables","authors":"Joshua Myers","doi":"10.1353/saf.2023.a923092","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/saf.2023.a923092","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Abstract:</p><p>Nathaniel Hawthorne’s description of a New England mansion in <i>The House of the Seven Gables</i> (1851) relies on well-established gothic tropes that ghost certain environmental incidents and characters’ reactions to them. In turn, natural encroachment on human structures seems an otherworldly and unlikely phenomenon. This rhetorical move eases tension in stories where buildings symbolize U.S. success at mastering the landscape but also reveals architecture’s constant vulnerability to outdoor elements. This article examines Hawthorne’s depictions of decay to argue that widespread and resilient fungi, most usually mold, underscore human anxieties about the environment lurking amid portrayals of gothic structures like the famed seven-gabled house. Conditions of rot suggest the impermanence of buildings and, by extension, the limits of conquering the natural world, exhibiting an ecological reality that appears less troubling when represented through ghastly but impossible incidents. In Hawthorne’s novel, the haunting presence of fungal forms in materials, both inside the house and in the surrounding area, suggests failed ambitions and a passing socioeconomic status, so that the story transforms decay into spectral manifestation. An ecogothic reading thus highlights how sometimes unseen biological realities, such as conditions for fungal growth, enhance supernatural and existential horrors while also distracting from concerns about nature’s long-term damaging of human structures like houses. Like the mold it studies, this essay treats the psychology of domestic spaces (a major Hawthornean theme) as permeable by showing that the novel’s gloomy atmosphere, ghostly hauntings, alleged curses, and other fantastical events are enhanced by the presence of a veiled ecological catalyst. </p></p>","PeriodicalId":42494,"journal":{"name":"STUDIES IN AMERICAN FICTION","volume":"249 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-03-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140323598","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Afterword: On Exhuming an Early American Ecogothic","authors":"Tom J. Hillard","doi":"10.1353/saf.0.a923009","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/saf.0.a923009","url":null,"abstract":"&lt;span&gt;&lt;span&gt;In lieu of&lt;/span&gt; an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:&lt;/span&gt;\u0000&lt;p&gt;Afterword: On Exhuming an Early American Ecogothic 275 Studies in American Fiction 50.1–2 (2023): 275–285 © 2024 by Johns Hopkins University Press Afterword: On Exhuming an Early American Ecogothic Tom J. Hillard Boise State University “Yet one day the demons of America must be placated, the ghosts must be appeased, the Spirit of Place atoned for. Then the true passionate love for American Soil will appear. As yet, there is too much menace in the landscape.” —D. H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature (1923)1 I n the early 2000s, back when I was a doctoral student at the University of Arizona, tinkering with ideas that I then thought of as “dark nature” or “gothic nature,” I could scarcely have imagined, twenty years later, the publication of this special issue of Studies in American Fiction. The thought of such a range of scholars, from around the world, contributing their ideas to the flourishing field of the “ecogothic” was beyond anything that I could have dreamed. Back then, ecocriticism itself was still something of an emerging field, and one by no means yet widely embraced by the academy—so in those early explorations of the shadowy corners of ecocriticism and gothic literature, which itself had long been a marginalized area of study, my work then often felt fairly far afield. I relate all this because, as one of the earliest proponents of the mutually entwined study of ecocriticism and the gothic, I’ve observed the field develop with a watchful eye, and thus it is with particular excitement that I greet this current issue, rich as it is with its varied approaches to the ecogothic. The essays herein collectively demonstrate the range and versatility of what ecogothic studies has become, and they show its applicability to a broad swath of literary texts. In Matthew Sivils’s apt words from the introduction to this volume, “Once we start looking, the ecogothic seems to sprout up everywhere.”2 Indeed, in the past half-decade or so in particular, ecogothic scholarship has proliferated, and the 276 Studies in American Fiction ecogothic itself seems to be found everywhere among us. Moreover, nothing suggests that any of this will slow anytime soon. From an academic point of view, I see this as a very good thing. (Though from the point of view of a human being living on this planet, it’s perhaps less comforting to realize one may be living in a gothic tale!) As the field of ecogothic studies has grown—matured, even—the once amorphous definition of “ecogothic” has become clearer and, I think, more refined.As waves of critics continue to fine tune their usage of the term, it seems to be being applied in two primary ways: as a critical approach or way of studying a text, and as a quality of a literary work itself. That is, one can bring an “ecogothic lens” to a text, and at the same time, that text itself can contain ecogothic elements—in terms of","PeriodicalId":42494,"journal":{"name":"STUDIES IN AMERICAN FICTION","volume":"86 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-03-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140300000","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}