Afterword: On Exhuming an Early American Ecogothic

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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 plot, setting, theme, and so forth. In his introduction to this issue, Sivils does a remarkable job surveying the evolving usage and meanings of ecogothic, so I needn’t repeat such a history here. Nor do I feel the need to stake any claim about what the term means or ought to mean. Given its proliferation in the past five years alone, it is hard to say what directions ecogothic studies might take in the coming years. Moreover, given my own inability to foresee the current popularity of ecogothic, I won’t pretend to know where the latest generation of scholars will take it (though I do know I will follow its developments with eagerness). So rather than being prognosticator, in this afterword I simply instead offer a few small observations about the field of gothic studies in general, and ecogothic studies in particular, in order to suggest some possible future developments that I think could be useful. In reading the thoughtful introduction to this special issue, I was struck by Sivils’s astute observation about “waves” of ecogothic scholarship. He notes that a “first wave of the ecogothic was about the recognition of the pervasive...