Monsters have always swarmed around the frontiers of colonialism and capitalism, from Europe's invasion and occupation of the Americas to the planetary emergency of the present day. In this volume, we discover how the early British Gothic far from a progenitor is in fact a belated cultural response to capitalist modernity, one anticipated by myriad spectres haunting the plantations of the 'New World'. Gothic did not begin in Britain, and then become global over time. Rather, as the volume reveals, gothic has always been world-gothic: a way of dealing with the alienation and anxiety that erupt with capitalist modernisation, when- and wherever this is taking place. Essays in the volume chart the new links and comparisons enabled by this insight, renovating established gothic concepts and outlining groundbreaking new theoretical infrastructure. Together, chapters provincialise the 'western' gothic tradition, in order to open up new possibilities for world-gothic reading.
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Upending gothic's Eurocentric origin story, this Companion follows modernity's monsters, from 'New World' plantations to planetary crisis.
Introduction: Five Hundred Years of World-Gothic Rebecca Duncan and
Rebekah Cumpsty; Part I. Gothic in the World: (Re)Conceptualisations;
1. The
undead's capitalist world-system Stephen Shapiro;
2. Whiteness and the
'Western' Gothic tradition Rebecca Duncan and Johan Höglund;
3. Gothic and
Labour: metabolic, reproductive, international Esthie Hugo; Part II.
World-Monsters: Global Transmissions and Genealogies;
4. Pre-colonial Gothic
and the Windigo Krista Collier-Jarvis;
5. Hauntings: African-based
spirituality in world-Gothic literature James Mellis;
6. Vampiric exhaustion
and extractive form: the Mozambican miner Thomas Waller;
7. Subversive
sorcery and reparative witchcraft: Huesera's challenges to coloniality
Valeria Villegas Lindvall; Part III. Worlding Gothic Theory:
8. World-Gothic
and the sublime Jana M. Giles;
9. A planetary grotesque Rune Graulund;10.
Uncanny animism: reframing the world-Gothic with Amos Tutuola Ryan Topper;
11. Abject/Abhuman/Human: provincializing world-Gothic monstrosity Rebekah
Cumpsty; Part IV. World-Gothic: transregional comparisons;
12. Gothic
inheritances in Oceania: problems of origins and ownership Caitlin Vandertop;
13. Tough oil Gothic: contemporary petrofiction across the North-South divide
Karl Emil Rosenbæk Reetz;
14. Scheherazade and Bluebeard: the world-Gothic
and bloody chambers in Arab women's writing Roxanne Douglas;
15. Coda:
catachresis and the politics of Gothic naming Rebekah Cumpsty and Rebecca
Duncan.
Rebecca Duncan is Associate Professor in Literature at Linnaeus University and Research Associate in English at the University of the Witwatersrand. Her recent publications include the edited volume The Edinburgh Companion to Globalgothic (2023), which won both the Justin D. Edwards Prize and a Choice Outstanding Academic Title Award in 2024. Rebekah Cumpsty is Associate Professor of Anglophone World Literature at Weber State University. She is the author of Postsecular Poetics: Negotiating the Sacred and Secular in Contemporary African Fiction (2022). Her research interests include religious studies and the postsecular, postcolonial and world literatures, with a focus on anglophone African fiction. Her recent publications have appeared in Gothic Studies, The Edinburgh Companion to Globalgothic (2023) and Contemporary Literature and the Body (2023).
