American Gothic: An Anthology from Salem Witchcraft to H. P. Lovecraft - Paperback

by Charles L. Crow (Editor)

American Gothic remains an enduringly fascinating genre, retaining its chilling hold on the imagination. This revised and expanded anthology brings together texts from the colonial era to the twentieth century including recently discovered material, canonical literary contributions from Poe and Wharton among many others, and literature from sub-genres such as feminist and 'wilderness' Gothic.

• Revised and expanded to incorporate suggestions from twelve years of use in many countries
• An important text for students of the expanding field of Gothic studies
• Strong representation of female Gothic, wilderness Gothic, the Gothic of race, and the legacy of Salem witchcraft
• Edited by a founding member of the International Gothic Association

Back Jacket

The chilling creativity of the American Gothic has retained its power to attract readers since it burst onto the literary scene in the eighteenth century, yet it has been the object of serious scholarship for only a few decades. Edited by a founding member of the International Gothic Association, the new edition of this anthology incorporates the whole range of factual and imaginative writing, from Cotton Mather's account of the witchcraft trials in the colonial era, through the poetry of Poe, Dickinson, and Longfellow and unsettling tales both long (Henry James's The Turn of the Screw)and short (the anonymous "Talking Bones"), to the beginning of modernism in the twentieth century.

The collection demonstrates the startling abundance of themes explored by these writers and reflects contemporary academic perspectives, with generous selections from genres such as feminist and "wilderness" Gothic. This new edition benefits from more than ten years of suggestions from readers and teachers while still offering prose and poetry from luminaries such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Henry James, Stephen Crane, Jack London, and Edith Wharton. It includes recently unearthed as well as canonical material and provides an unflinching view of America's secrets and fears: the thoughts that have been repressed, silenced, or forbidden. All editorial materials have been revised for this new edition, which includes brand-new selections such as the captivity narrative of Hannah Dustan, Madeline Yale Wynne's "The Little Room," Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper," and H. P. Lovecraft's "The Outsider."

Author Biography

Charles L. Crow is Professor Emeritus of English at Bowling Green State University in Ohio, USA, and has been a visiting scholar or lecturer at universities in Austria, the Czech Republic, China, and Croatia. He edited the first edition of this volume for Blackwell in 1999 and has written monographs and articles on several nineteenth- and twentieth-century American writers. A founding member of the International Gothic Association, he is also editor of A Companion to the Regional Literatures of America (Wiley-Blackwell, 2003).