Professor Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet's Books

The Poetics and Politics of the American Gothic

Gender and Slavery in Nineteenth-Century American Literature

By: Professor Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet

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The Poetics and Politics of the American Gothic

Gender and Slavery in Nineteenth-Century American Literature

By: Professor Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet

Taking as its point of departure recent insights about the performative nature of genre, The Poetics and Politics of the American Gothic challenges the critical tendency to accept at face value that gothic literature is mainly about fear. Instead, Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet argues that the American Gothic, and gothic literature in general, is also about judgment: how to judge and what happens when judgment is confronted with situations that defy its limits. Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, Gilman, and James all shared a concern with the political and ideological debates of their time, but tended to approach these debates indirectly. Thus, Monnet suggests, while slavery and race are not the explicit subject matter of antebellum works by Poe and Hawthorne, they nevertheless permeate it through suggestive analogies and tacit references. Similarly, Melville, Gilman, and James use the gothic to explore the categories of gender and sexuality that were being renegotiated during the latter half of the century. Focusing on "The Fall of the House of Usher," The Marble Faun, Pierre, The Turn of the Screw, and "The Yellow Wallpaper," Monnet brings to bear minor texts by the same authors that further enrich her innovative readings of these canonical works. At the same time, her study persuasively argues that the Gothic's endurance and ubiquity are in large part related to its being uniquely adapted to rehearse questions about judgment and justice that continue to fascinate and disturb.

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178

Publisher

Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.

Published Date

ISBN 10

1409475883

ISBN 13

9781409475880

Critical Discourses of the Fantastic, 1712–1831

By: Professor David Sandner

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Critical Discourses of the Fantastic, 1712–1831

By: Professor David Sandner

Challenging literary histories that locate the emergence of fantastic literature in the Romantic period, David Sandner shows that tales of wonder and imagination were extremely popular throughout the eighteenth century. Sandner engages contemporary critical definitions and defenses of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century fantastic literature, demonstrating that a century of debate and experimentation preceded the Romantic's interest in the creative imagination. In 'The Fairy Way of Writing,' Joseph Addison first defines the literary use of the supernatural in a 'modern' and 'rational' age. Other writers like Richard Hurd, James Beattie, Samuel Johnson, James Percy, and Walter Scott influence the shape of the fantastic by defining and describing the modern fantastic in relation to a fabulous and primitive past. As the genre of the 'purely imaginary,' Sandner argues, the fantastic functions as a discourse of the sublime imagination, albeit a contested discourse that threatens to disrupt any attempt to ground the sublime in the realistic or sympathetic imagination. His readings of works by authors such as Ann Radcliffe, William Beckford, Horace Walpole, Mary Shelley, Walter Scott, and James Hogg not only redefine the antecedents of the fantastic but also offer a convincing account of how and why the fantastic came to be marginalized in the wake of the Enlightenment.

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206

Publisher

Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.

Published Date

ISBN 10

1409478998

ISBN 13

9781409478997

The Transatlantic Gothic Novel and the Law, 1790–1860

By: Professor Bridget M Marshall

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The Transatlantic Gothic Novel and the Law, 1790–1860

By: Professor Bridget M Marshall

Tracing the use of legal themes in the gothic novel, Bridget M. Marshall shows these devices reflect an outpouring of anxiety about the nature of justice. On both sides of the Atlantic, novelists like William Godwin, Mary Shelley, Charles Brockden Brown, and Hannah Crafts question the foundations of the Anglo-American justice system through their portrayals of criminal and judicial procedures and their use of found documents and legal forms as key plot devices. As gothic villains, from Walpole's Manfred to Godwin's Tyrrell to Stoker's Dracula, manipulate the law and legal system to expand their power, readers are confronted with a legal system that is not merely ineffective at stopping villains but actually enables them to inflict ever greater harm on their victims. By invoking actual laws like the Black Act in England or the Fugitive Slave Act in America, gothic novels connect the fantastic horrors that constitute their primary appeal with much more shocking examples of terror and injustice. Finally, the gothic novel's preoccupation with injustice is just one element of many that connects the genre to slave narratives and to the horrors of American slavery.

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Page Count

208

Publisher

Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.

Published Date

ISBN 10

1409476324

ISBN 13

9781409476320

Book's by Professor Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet

The Poetics and Politics of the American Gothic

The Poetics and Politics of the American Gothic

Critical Discourses of the Fantastic, 1712–1831

Critical Discourses of the Fantastic, 1712–1831

The Transatlantic Gothic Novel and the Law, 1790–1860

The Transatlantic Gothic Novel and the Law, 1790–1860

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