Goddu traces the development of the female, southern, and African-American gothic in literature between the Revolutionary and Civil Wars, placing in a new historical context Poe's The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, Hawthorne's The Blithedale Romance, Alcott's ghost stories, and Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl.
Teresa A. Goddu is assistant professor of English at Vanderbilt University, where she was a fellow of the Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities.
Argues that the claustrophobic horrors of Gothic literature are not private, but arise where concrete experience contradicts the dream world of social myth. This brilliant interpretation of the Gothic treats the nightmares that emerge when the reality of racial oppression disrupts the vision of America as a land of freedom.
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