MACMILLAN American Women's Regionalist Fiction: Mapping the Gothic (Palgrave Gothic)

 American Women’s Regionalist Fiction: Mapping the Gothic seeks to redress the monolithic vision of American Gothic by analyzing the various sectional or regional attempts to Gothicize what is most claustrophobic or peculiar about local history. Since women writers were often relegated to inferior status, it is especially compelling to look at women from the Gothic perspective. The regionalist Gothic develops along the line of difference and not unity―thus emphasizing regional peculiarities or a sense of superiority in terms of regional history, natural landscapes, immigrant customs, folk tales, or idiosyncratic ways.  The essays study the uncanny or the haunting quality of “the commonplace,” as Hawthorne would have it in his introduction to The House of the Seven Gables,  in regionalist Gothic fiction by a wide range of women writers between ca. 1850 and 1930.  This collection seeks to examine how/if the regionalist perspective is small, limited, and stultifying and leads to Gothic moments, or whether the intersection between local and national leads to a clash that is jarring and Gothic in nature. Review “The individual essays collected in American Women’s Regionalist Fiction: Mapping the Gothic are valuable as perceptive studies of a wide range of women writers, but the book is ultimately more than the sum of its parts. Together, these essays establish the existence of a powerful literary tradition that unites Gothic conventions with a feminist exploration of landscape and place. Monika Elbert and Rita Bode and their contributors provide a compelling argument for the importance of this feminist transformation of Gothic spaces in the United States while recovering and illuminating a number of unjustly neglected texts.” ( Alfred Bendixen, Lecturer in English, Princeton University, USA, and Executive Director, American Literature Association)   From the Back Cover American Women’s Regionalist Fiction: Mapping the Gothic seeks to redress the monolithic view of a national American Gothic, instead considering specific regions in the U.S. and how they express their own particular versions of the Gothic. Focusing on American women writers whose views of hauntings are ultimately connected to their image of an internal and ofttimes oppressive domestic landscape, these essays consider the ways the outdoor landscape feeds their fantasy and contributes to their notion of a natural history and local mythology that coincides with their sense of a world beyond the confines of the home. The clash between these two realms often paves the way for the Gothic encounter. Ultimately, these essays reveal the impact of the regional Gothic in considering how collision between the local and the national precipitates a conflict that leads to the Gothic protagonist’s sense of belonging or alienation. Monika Elbert is Professor of English and a Distinguished University Scholar at Montclair State University, USA. She is editor of the Nathaniel Hawthorne Review and her recent publications include: Hawthorne in Context (2018) and, co-edited with Wendy Ryden, Haunting Realities:  Naturalist Gothic and American Realism (2017). Rita Bode is Professor of English Literature at Trent University, Canada. Her co-edited collections include L.M. Montgomery and the Matter of Nature(s) (2018), and L.M. Montgomery’s Rainbow Valleys: The Ontario Years, 1911-1942 (2015). About the Author Monika Elbert is Professor of English and a Distinguished University Scholar at Montclair State University, USA. She is editor of the Nathaniel Hawthorne Review and her recent publications include: Hawthorne in Context (2018) and, co-edited with Wendy Ryden, Haunting Realities:  Naturalist Gothic and American Realism (2017). Rita Bode is Professor of English Literature at Trent University, Canada. Her co-edited collections include L.M. Montgomery and the Matter of Nature(s) (2018) and L.M. Montgomery’s Rainbow Valleys: The