Description
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’: otherand entirely incomprehensible.
Table of Contents
Chapter 1. Introduction.- Part I. Hell-Beasts and Haunting.- Chapter 2. ‘Like a Madd Dogge’: Demonic Animals and Animal Demoniacs in Early Modern English Possession Narratives.- Chapter 3. ‘Most Hideous of Gaolers’: The Spider in Ernest G. Henham’s Tenebrae.- Chapter 4. Devouring the Animal Within: Uncanny Otherness in Richard Adams’s Plague Dogs.- Chapter 5. Hunted, Now Haunting: The Figure of the Thylacine in Tasmanian Gothic Fiction.- Chapter 6. ‘What Do I Use to Make Them Afraid?’: The Gothic Animal and the Problem of Legitimacy in American Superhero Comics.- Chapter 7. The Monster Shark Still Lives: The Lazarus Taxon and Spectral Animal Bodies.- Chapter 8. ‘Rats is Bogies I Tell You, and Bogies is Rats’: Rats, Repression, and the Gothic Mode.- Chapter 9. At Home with Miniature Sea-monsters: Philip Henry Gosse.- Chapter 10. Uncanny Snails: Patricia Highsmith and the Allure of the Gastropod.- Chapter 11. ‘I Have Flyophobia’: Jane Rice’s ‘The Idol of the Flies’ and Evil as Unwelcome Houseguest.- Chapter 12. ‘Encircled by Minute, Evilly-Intentioned Airplanes’: The Uncanny Biopolitics of Robotic Bees.- Part III. Cultural Anxiety, Violence, and the Non-Human Body.- Chapter 13. A Bark and Stormy Night: Ann Radcliffe’s Animals.- Chapter 14. Hellish Horses and Monstrous Men: Gothic Horsemanship in Washington Irving and Edgar Allan Poe.- Chapter 15. The Colonial Idol, the Animalistic, and the New Woman in the Imperial Gothic of Richard Marsh.- Chapter 16. Victor Hugo’s Pieuvre and the Marine EcoGothic.- Chapter 17. The Human Within and the Animal Without?: Rats and Mr Bunnsy in Terry Pratchett’s The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents.- Chapter 18. Companion Animals in Contemporary Scottish Women’s Gothic.
