The Forest and the Ecogothic: The Deep Dark Woods in the Popular Imagination

ISBN-13: 9783030351533 / Angielski / Twarda / 2020 / 308 str.

Elizabeth Parker

Recenzje

"Comprehensive in its scope and very well structured, the six parts of the book make for a thorough guide through our fears of forests. ... Parker guides her reader with obvious pleasure through her book, making us enjoy the threat of the forest 'closing like a pair of jaws,' as Angela Carter once memorably put it, around us." (Annemarie Mönch, Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, Vol. 31 (3), 2020)

Spis treści

Chapter 1: Theorising the Forest: Approaching a Dark Ecology.- Chapter 2: ‘What if it’s the Trees?’: The Animated Forest.- Chapter 3: Where the Wild Things Are: Monsters in the Forest.- Chapter 4: ‘It isn’t Right to Build so Close to the Woods’: Humans in the Forest.- Conclusion.

O autorze

Elizabeth Parker has lectured in English Literature and Popular Culture at a number of universities across the UK and Ireland. She is the founding editor of the journal Gothic Nature: New Directions in Ecohorror and the EcoGothic. Her research interests include the intersections between popular culture, horror, the Gothic, and the environmental humanities.

Blurb

‘This is a rigorously researched, wide-ranging and original study with international reach and significance. It makes a very important contribution to the Gothic field.’

 – Catherine Wynne, Reader in English, University of Hull

 ‘I could not recommend this book more strongly. It is truly exceptional: thoroughly researched, effectively structured, convincingly argued, containing always-insightful readings of a dizzying array of film and fiction, and beautifully written. This is ground-breaking, important work.’

– Dawn Keetley, Professor of English, Lehigh University

 

This book offers the first full length study on the pervasive archetype of The Gothic Forest in Western culture. The idea of the forest as deep, dark, and dangerous has an extensive history and continues to resonate throughout contemporary popular culture. The Forest and the EcoGothic examines both why we fear the forest and how exactly these fears manifest in our stories. It draws on and furthers the nascent field of the ecoGothic, which seeks to explore the intersections between ecocriticism and Gothic studies. In the age of the Anthropocene, this work importantly interrogates our relationship to and understandings of the more-than-human world. This work introduces the trope of the Gothic forest, as well as important critical contexts for its discussion, and examines the three main ways in which this trope manifests: as a living, animated threat; as a traditional habitat for monsters; and as a dangerous site for human settlement. This book will appeal to students and scholars with interests in horror and the Gothic, ecohorror and the ecoGothic, environmentalism, ecocriticism, and popular culture more broadly. The accessibility of the subject of ‘The Deep Dark Woods’, coupled with increasingly mainstream interests in interactions between humanity and nature, means this work will also be of keen interest to the general public.