Gothic Animals: Uncanny Otherness and the Animal With-Out (Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature) - Tapa dura

Acerca del autor

Ruth Heholt is a senior lecturer in English at Falmouth University. She has published widely on the topics of the Gothic, crime, gender and the supernatural. She is currently completing a monograph on the Victorian writer Catherine Crowe and is editor of the journal Revenant: Critical and Creative Studies of the Supernatural.

Melissa Edmundson is a lecturer in English at Clemson University and specializes in nineteenth- and twentieth-century women writers and supernatural fiction. She is the author of Women’s Ghost Literature in Nineteenth-Century Britain (University of Wales Press, 2013) and Women’s Colonial Gothic Writing, 1850-1930: Haunted Empire (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018).

De la contraportada

This book begins with the assumption that the presence of non-human creatures causes an always-already uncanny rift in human assumptions about reality. Exploring the dark side of animal nature and the otherness of animals as viewed by humans, and employing cutting-edge theory on non-human animals, eco-criticism, literary and cultural theory, this book takes the Gothic genre into new territory.

After the dissemination of Darwin s theories of evolution, nineteenth-century fiction quickly picked up on the idea of the animal within . Here, the fear explored was of an unruly, defiant, degenerate and entirely amoral animality lying (mostly) dormant within all of us. However, non-humans and humans have other sorts of encounters, too, and even before Darwin, humans have often had an uneasy relationship with animals, which, as Donna Haraway puts it, have a way of looking back at us. In this book, the focus is not on the animal within but rather on the animal with-out : other and entirely incomprehensible. 

Ruth Heholt is a senior lecturer in English at Falmouth University. She has published widely on the topics of the Gothic, crime, gender and the supernatural. She is currently completing a monograph on the Victorian writer Catherine Crowe and is editor of the journal Revenant: Critical and Creative Studies of the Supernatural.