Coasts and the Gothic

Literature, Littoral Cultures, and Haunted Shores

Editor(s) Emily Alder,Jimmy Packham,Joan Passey

Language: English

Genre(s): Literary Studies

Series: Gothic Literary Studies

  • February 2027 · 264 pages ·216x138mm

  • · Hardback - 9781837724529
  • · eBook - pdf - 9781837724536
  • · eBook - epub - 9781837724543

This volume examines the longstanding relationship between coastal environments and the Gothic imagination. Coasts are vital but often unsettled sites in ecological, political, national and cultural terms, and the present study demonstrates the importance of the coast to the Gothic literary tradition. In turn, it highlights the value of thinking through the Gothic to enrich our understanding of littoral spaces around the world, and the meanings with which they have been invested. Just as coasts often invite us to think beyond the borders of nations and states, Coasts and the Gothic adopts a deliberately global perspective in its exploration of the Gothic coast. The writings of both canonical and lesser-known Gothic authors illuminate the rich and varied ways by which our shores have been found to be haunted: the chapters in this volume explore literature produced in and about Britain, the US, Mexico, South Africa, the Andaman Islands, Rapa Nui and China.

Acknowledgements

List of Illustrations

Notes on Contributors

Introduction: Gothic Coasts
Emily Alder and Jimmy Packham

Part I: Shifting Sands: Post/Colonial Coastal Histories and Hauntings

1. The Haunted Coast: Water Spirits and Ghosts in Meg Vandermerwe’s The Woman of the Stone Sea
Confidence Joseph

2. Island Shores, Peripherality and Spectres That Connect: Andaman Islands in Postcolonial Island Literatures
Arunima Bhattacharya

3. ‘Typhoon and terror in Hong-Kong harbour’: Globalgothic and Weird Tales of the China Coast
Jimmy Packham

4. Fear of the Unknown: Popular Culture and the Gothic Re-imagining of Rapa Nui
Ian Conrich

5. Tláloc and Chac Mool Over Mexico City: The Haunting of Aztec Water Deities on Mexico City
Antonio Alcalá González

Part II: Beach Bodies and Coastal Erosion: Loss, Legacies and Littoral Desire

6. ‘White snakes of sea-foam’: Coastal Space and the Lesbian Gothic in Emily M. Danforth’s Plain Bad Heroines
Rachel M. Friars

7. Seaside Suicides, Shipwrecks and Spectrality: Shores in Six Novels by Mary Shelley
Liz Yuen-Yuk Wan

8. Where Past and Present Collide: Haunted Seascapes and Gothic Exile in William Godwin’s Deloraine
Sophia Lange

9. ‘Lost in the Scillies, I’ve heerd tell’: Tracking the Skeleton of the Lost Land of Lyonesse in the Archipelagic Work of Bram Stoker
Beth Howell

10. Shoring the Fragments: On Writing at the Tideline
Catherine Spooner

Author(s): Emily Alder

Jimmy Packham is Associate Professor of English Literature at the University of Birmingham. He works in the fields of the blue humanities, coastal studies, and Gothic and ecoGothic studies.

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Author(s): Jimmy Packham

Jimmy Packham is Associate Professor of English Literature at the University of Birmingham. He works in the fields of the blue humanities, coastal studies, and Gothic and ecoGothic studies.

Read more

Author(s): Joan Passey

Jimmy Packham is Associate Professor of English Literature at the University of Birmingham. He works in the fields of the blue humanities, coastal studies, and Gothic and ecoGothic studies.

Read more

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