This book illuminates the ways in which Christianity gothicizes humanitys response to the environment through a survey of Ecogothic texts from the eighteenth century to the present day.
Religious Horror and the Ecogothic explores the intersections of Anglophone Christianity and the Ecogothic, the category of Gothic literature that explores the ecocritical in Gothic literature, film, and media. Acknowledging the impact of key Christian ideologies and aesthetics upon interpretations of human relationships with the environment, works in the Ecogothic subgenre interrogate spiritual identity, unease, awe, and humanitys darker impulses in relation to myriad ecological systems. Through an extensive survey of Ecogothic texts from the eighteenth century to the present day this book illuminates the ways in which a Christianized understanding of hierarchy, dominion, fear, sublimity, and other critical areas of the human experience shapes reactions to the environment and conceptions of humanitys place in it, from Eden to Armageddon. It interrogates the evolving discourses which inform current environmental policy, as well as, more fundamentally, definitions of the human in a rapidly changing world.
Recenzijas
Religious Horror and the Ecogothic provides the first sustained analysis of the representation of Anglophone Christianity in the ecogothic. The book reflects on why Christianity is represented as complicit with anti-ecological views in texts and other media from the eighteenth century to the present day. This is a timely and important book which examines how religious interests have become used to support anti-ecological capitalist ambitions. -- Professor Andrew Smith, University of Sheffield, UK
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Approaches to Anglophone Religious Horror and the Ecogothic
By Kathleen Hudson and Mary Going
Part One: Early Gothic Origins
Chapter One
Biblical Marine Biology: Cotton Mathers Cetological Exegesis and the Oceanic
Ecogothic
By Jennifer Schell
Chapter Two
The ladys talent for description leads her to excess: Radcliffe,
Landscape, and Gender
By Rosemary Whitcombe
Chapter Three
Sacred Consumption: An Ecocritical Reading of Gothic Cannibalism
By Laura R. Kremmel
Part Two: Long Nineteenth Century Evolutions
Chapter Four
Between Domination and Sublimity: The Ecogothic and Moby Dick
By Jonathan Greenaway
Chapter Five
Occlusive Re-Enchantment: J.S. Le Fanus Ecogothic
By Madeline Potter
Chapter Six
Ecological Hellscapes of Religious Doubt: Exploring Gothic Nature and the
Horrific Divine in Gerard Manley Hopkins and James Thomson
By Ruth-Anne Walbank
Chapter Seven
Strange Summits: Christian Hope and Salvation in the Mountain Topography of
Algernon Blackwoods The Glamour of the Snow
By Christopher M. Scott
Part Three: Twentieth Century Reimaginings
Chapter Eight
Anthropocenic anxieties: What humanity should not have summoned in H.P.
Lovecrafts The Call of Cthulhu and William Hope Hodgsons The Nightland
by Antonio Alcalį Gonzįlez
Chapter Nine
Are We Not Men?: Dominionism and the Evolution of The Island of Doctor
Moreau
By Mary Going
Chapter Ten
A strange green God: Ecocritical Readings of Christian and Cult Sacrifice
in Postmodern Folk Horror
By Kathleen Hudson
Part Four: Contemporary Ecohorrors
Chapter Eleven
Ecogothic Meets Religious Horror in M. Night Shyamalans The Happening
Agnieszka
Chapter Twelve
Oryx and Eve: Geneses, Gender, and the Gothic in Margaret Atwoods Maddaddam
trilogy
By Lauren Nixon
Chapter Thirteen
Atavistic Trolls and Christian Immorality in Nordic Ecogothic
Kaja Franck
Afterword
Our Burning World
By Kathleen Hudson and Mary Going
Index
About the Contributors
Mary Going is British Academy postdoctoral research associate at the University of Sheffield.
Kathleen Hudson is adjunct professor at the United States Naval Academy and Anne Arundel Community College, and guest lecturer and contributor for the Rosenbach Museum and Library and the Gothic Women project.
