American Gothic Television

Examining works from the full history of American television, this chapter focuses on three aspects of American gothic television: first, the entwined relationship between realism and the gothic in early television; second, the focus of gothic series on probable characters in improbable situations; and, finally, the division of gothic television into conventional dramatic domestic and workplace forms, and their challenge to that dramatic division.

The Devil in the Slum: American Urban Gothic

This chapter focuses on the emergence of American urban gothic in literature of the late Antebellum. From roughly 1840 to 1860 a community of writers organized an extant urban gothic vocabulary into a popular and influential subgenre, city-mysteries, which ostentatiously announced their link to the gothic novel. These mysteries were intimately intertwined with urban reportage of the so-called ‘flash press’ among other art forms, especially the stage.

Southern Gothic

This chapter examines the history of Southern Gothic through three recent media whose original visual imaginary delineates gothic aberrance. In the broad reach of visual media the Southern Gothic finds its most potent images and narratives. The film Trash Humpers (2009) demonstrates how the Southern Gothic story could not be told anywhere else; the TV series True Blood (2008-14) emphasizes sexuality and difference via its contemporary take on the regional genre; and the film Black Snake Moan (2006) ties these threads together through its long-standing gothic narrative of racial and sexual mores.

Ethno-gothic: Repurposing Genre in Contemporary American Literature

This chapter notes how traditional American gothic literature has been largely motivated by racial dread and fears of miscegenation. It then argues that many contemporary ethno-fiction writers repurpose gothic tropes and idioms to two ends. The first is to critique anxieties of American gothic in order to expose the racialism embedded in the assimiliationist and hegemonic narrative of upward mobility defined by the ethnic ‘melting pot’. The second is to use these gothic redeployments imaginatively to disinter the voices of those legions who have died and disappeared, un-mourned.

Doppelgamers: Video Games and Gothic Choice

This chapter explores gothic elements encoded into the narrative and the very act of choice that govern video games. These elements both reinforce and expose the lie of rational choice that undergirds the neoliberal economy that saw games rise to media dominance. Videogames may be simulacra, but not just virtual realities: they are the uncanny symptom of how the neoliberal subject recognizes its own lack of identity. Games are thus the gothic double of the Enlightenment self, the prime image of the hollow American neoliberal consumer mass-marketed as self-fashioning individual.

American Gothic Art

This essay surveys the gothic in American art from its earliest influence by 18th- and 19th-century British culture to gothic boom in late 20th- and early 21st-century culture. The gothic links not only to goth subculture of the 1980s but also to multiple expressions in film, music, fashion, design and architecture. This cross-pollination between art, literature and more ephemeral forms of gothic popular culture is a a typical product of postmodernism. American gothic has become a ubiquitous signifier for dark moods in times of change and crisis as expressed in a contemporary mordant mindset, the liberal indulgence in horror, macabre images and flirting with disaster.

Gothic Monstrosity: Charles Brockden Brown’s Edgar Huntly and the Trope of the Bestial Indian

This chapter reads the development and sedimentation of the savage image of American Indians in early American history through the American gothic’s monstrous tropes, concluding with 1799 novel Edgar Huntly by Charles Brockden Brown, acclaimed as the pioneer of American gothic. If for Brown the American equivalent to Gothic castles are the perils of the western wilderness, Native Americans are the monstrous equivalent of that setting’s mythical chimera. Both inhuman and antagonistic Other, for Brown the Indian, at once integral and liminal, is a quintessential element of the American gothic genre.

Introduction

This introduction defines American gothic historically, thematically, and conceptually, and traces the history of the cultural analysis of the American gothic. It suggests that the definitions of America and those of gothic are so closely related as to be inseparable. For the purposes of this Companion, America is gothic.

Consumed out of the Good Land: The American Zombie, Geopolitics and the Post-War World

This chapter argues that post-WWII zombie narratives offer a terrifying allegory of national selfhood. The traumatic dislocations of post-war geopolitics range from 1950s’ fear of communist infiltration and nuclear annihilation to Vietnam’s neo-colonialist catastrophe, and from 1970s’ consumer fetishism and economic collapse to the contemporary dominance of globalization. In the zombie horde’s total disregard for national borders, reducing survivors to traumatized sub-humans huddled in the wreckage of civil society, we see the gothic interrogation of our current economic problems, specifically the transformative impact of global neoliberalism.

American Vampires

This chapter charts the American vampire narrative through four stages: 1) a ‘pre-history’ of its American origins; 2) the legacy of Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) in early twentieth-century American literary and cinematic adaptations; 3) the proliferation of vampire narratives via their increasing celebration of the vampire as hero liberated from social convention and embodying post-Watergate scepticism of authority; and 4) twenty-first-century representations whose ironic humanization of the vampire contest hegemonic structures of race, gender, and sexuality.