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The so-called nonhuman turn has a great role to play in theoretical elaborations of the Anthropocene. This broad tendency of thought incorporates contemporary non-anthropocentric schools of thought such as Actor-Network-Theory (ANT), Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO) and posthumanism. These various sociological and philosophical directions have one thing in common: the rejection and transcendence of anthropocentrism, as well as a new sensitivity to the heterogeneous, irreducible and multiple nature of reality. Openness to post-anthropocentrism is a general characteristic of authors who work in Anthropocene theory today. However, posthumanist philosophy, while it decenters and deconstructs the human, is also committed to an aesthetic of uncertainty, fear, and even horror. Simon C. Estok, in his highly important article “Theorising the EcoGothic,” shows that during the ecological crisis philosophical thought must traverse unknown terrain, while also emphasizing the darker aspects of sociocultural constructs. Posthumanism must, by its very nature, prepare for the unthinkable in a quite literal sense according to Stefan Herbrechter. The Anthropocene constitutes an opening to what Nick Land calls “Outsideness”. A future condition “after” the human can be understood as a condition that opens onto a dark, monstrous, threatening or, in a word, hybrid future beyond any anthropic measure.

Copyright of Revista Canaria de Estudios Ingleses is the property of Universidad de La Laguna and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Revista Canaria de Estudios Ingleses is the property of Universidad de La Laguna and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Revista Canaria de Estudios Ingleses is the property of Universidad de La Laguna and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This article explores the figure of the hag within Nathaniel Hawthorne's fiction, situating her as a critical embodiment of the ecogothic tradition. By expanding on Elizabeth Parker's characterization of witches as ecogothic figures, the analysis focuses on how Hawthorne's hags are defined by their aging, decaying bodies. These hags are not merely Gothic symbols of death and decay but also represent the intertwining of human and nonhuman ecologies, embodying a form of "trans-corporeality" as defined by Stacy Alaimo. As Hawthorne's hags harness the dark forces of decay and decomposition, they challenge traditional views that reduce these figures to inert, passive entities. Instead, these hags are shown to possess a dynamic and unsettling vitality, rooted in their intimate connection with the darker and more chthonic elements of the natural world. Through close readings of Hawthorne's The House of the Seven Gables and "The Hollow of the Three Hills," the article highlights how the ecogothic lens reenchants these figures, restoring their ecological and literary significance within the context of the Anthropocene. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nathaniel Hawthorne's short story "Young Goodman Brown" (1835) combines the ecoGothic horror of the forest with the internal turmoil of Young Goodman Brown's complex and contested perceptions. A range of short stories and novels have been inspired by Hawthorne's tale of Young Goodman Brown's ill-fated adventure, one of which is Stephen King's award-winning "The Man in the Black Suit" (first published in The New Yorker in 1994; collected in King's Everything's Eventual in 2002). This article provides an overview of how the author has used these stories in literature courses to introduce students to literary terminology, close reading, and analysis, as well as specific elements of Hawthorne and larger Gothic tradition. Reading these Hawthorne and King stories together highlights the lasting influence of Hawthorne's "Young Goodman Brown" on the contemporary Gothic tradition, as well as the way these tropes have been negotiated and reimagined through King's work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The focus of my inquiry are environmentally inflected metaphors and discourses of toxicity which inform the contemporary North American posthuman lyric. This provisional generic category of the posthuman lyric has been inspired by the recent shift from an anthropocentric understanding of lyric subjectivities to a biocentric perspective which repositions human epistemologies in relation to more-than-human matter. The posthuman angle questions the concept of the sovereign human self, stressing transversal ontologies, open to inter-agential exchanges, diverse biosemiotic processes and communication loops. My primary interest is in poetic representations of the human body as a transversal, toxic, catastrophe- and death-haunted wasteland. The volumes chosen to problematize those processes are Allison Cobb’s After We All Died (2016), an elegiac meditation on the dying human species and anthropogenic change, and Adam Dickinson’s Anatomic (2018), which probes the leaky perimeters of the chemical self using an electronic microscope and burden tests of the poet’s own bodily tissues. The posthumanist angle which informs the analyses is supplemented with an ecoGothic one, as both critical paradigms can be seen as interrogatory discourses which probe human fears and hopes concerning the “edge of the human” and the recognition of non-human agency. Within the ecoGothic framework, nature is seen as “a contested site”—a “space of crisis,” where human and non-human ecologies interact and co-produce meaning. This double lens will be used for the study of posthuman imaginaries and Anthropocene affects employed by Dickinson and Cobb.

Excess signals uncontrolled natural agency and thus provides a key ingredient in horror and ecohorror. Because excess ultimately threatens our agency over matter and meaning, nature comes to threaten the fall and dissolution of humanity, offer an erasure of what it means to be human, and exert a muffling of the very agency that defines our sense of our exceptionalism. Yet horror and ecohorror also enthrall. They do so precisely because they provide a perversely traumatophilic/traumatophobic sensation, a paradoxical presence of opposites that somehow, like sweet-and-sour soup for the psyche, tastes good. We watch or read ecohorror for the attraction and repulsion its various traumas offer. Horror and the disgusting captivate us, reminding us at the same time of our corporeality and its fragility. Slime is central here. Slime is the horror of boundary transgressions, of indefinability, of unstoppability, of corporeal and natural agency. Reactions to slime reveal not only a fear of nature but a fear of women, and understanding theoretical connections between sexism and ecophobia is a critical step toward ending both. Central here is understanding how the balancing between attraction and repulsion, traumatophilia and traumatophobia, produces compelling spectacle that is entertaining but stimulates no activist engagement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study will analyse elements of the EcoGothic in the poetry of Sylvia Plath, and will focus in particular on her poems set in the “Yorkshire” landscape which she visited after marrying the English poet Ted Hughes. The EcoGothic looks to evaluate environmental concerns through the Gothic lens and is a sub-strand of Ecocriticism, which in its widest definition looks to evaluate the relationships of culture on the non-human world. The EcoGothic utilises the tropes of the Gothic genre such as: monstrosity, imprisonment, fear, the Other, the Uncanny, repression, oppression and the Sublime to illuminate issues surrounding the self, relationships, landscapes and the environment. In particular this study will focus on the following areas: how Plath uses elements of the EcoGothic to explore patriarchal dominance of women: how the Yorkshire landscape represents the uncanny, developing the sense of dislocation her speakers feel from the self and their wider environment; how Plath uses elements of the American Sublime to highlight a sense of existential anxiety brought on by encounters with blank landscapes.

Victorian poet Eliza Cook (1812-1889) once wished to be a "bird, or boat, or any thing" to inhabit the seascape she loved. Achieving this elision of human, object, and environment poetically, if not practically, Cook produced several anthropomorphising and animating it-narratives which adopted nonhuman perspectives as her own. This article examines the creation of plant voices in two such poems, "Song of the Hempseed" (1843) and "Song of the Seaweed" (1844), which offer contrasting yet intertwined negotiations of human-environment relationships. To foreground and theorise these texts' plant/algal protagonists, I adopt an EcoGothic lens which pays particular attention to Cook's use of key nonhuman EcoGothic tropes in "Song of the Seaweed," namely her evocation of uncanny vegetal agency, multi-species monstrosity, and transcorporeal and sympathetic entanglements. Through these means, I argue that Cook's "Seaweed" offers an education in shedding plant indifference, an opportunity to imaginatively identify with the nonhuman, and an encapsulation of the struggles of animating plants without erasing their alterity. An EcoGothic approach to Cook thus allows "Seaweed" to afford a poetic route through concepts key to current environmental thought and points to as yet uncharted territories which may prove fruitful in the expanding field of ecocriticism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores Ann Radcliffe's The Romance of the Forest (1791) and the eighteenth-century EcoGothic through her construction of the littoral space. Radcliffe's early and middle romances combine prose with "interspersed" poetry and play with fictive European topographies. While Radcliffe's landscape description has received significant attention in scholarly research, much less has been done to consider how her writing might contribute to understanding ecocritical concerns and values in eighteenthcentury literature. This article focuses on the coastal Gothic in The Romance of the Forest, which invites new understandings of the relationship between humans and the natural world and responds to calls from the Blue Humanities to reread the aquatic space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the article I discuss Nathaniel Hawthorne's ecological imagination as problematized in his lesser-known short story "The Snow-Image: A Childish Miracle" (1849). Although Hawthorne wrote the story for children, it carries a darker gothic undertone, illustrating the problematic aspect of the Romantic nature/culture division. The focus of my inquiry are the potential ecological implications. The analytical framework is taken from Andrew Smith and William Hughes' edited collection Ecogothic (2013), in which several scholars work towards a definition of an environmentally conscious variety of the gothic genre. Using some of their findings and concepts along with selected ecocritical and New Materialist theories, I interrogate Hawthorne's highly ambiguous and shifting tropes of nature which reveal the correlation between the crisis of the imagination and that of the environment. I argue that the central trope of the snow-child and the trajectory of the narrative conceal a Frankensteinesque subplot employed to critically rethink nature as a transcendental experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, the field of ecogothic criticism has provided new and generative ways of thinking about interactions between nature and the Gothic within literary works. Though scholars have frequently analyzed elements of the Gothic and depictions of nature within Welty's work, the field of ecogothic criticism provides a new way for approaching the intersection of these elements. In this essay, I draw upon ecogothic understandings of time and space to offer a new reading of Welty's "Moon Lake." Ecogothic space refers primarily to human enmeshment in the environment and inseparability from the rest of nature; ecogothic time refers to humanity's long past, connecting us through evolution to animals and plants. In "Moon Lake," Welty depicts the campers' evolutionary relationship to the world around them by drawing attention to her characters' animal- and plant-like qualities and challenging their understandings of the human/nonhuman boundary. This reading has consequences beyond the human/nonhuman relationship: by placing all her characters—White and Black, wealthy and poor—within the long history of evolutionary time and the encroaching space of inescapable nature, Welty reveals the artificiality of human-constructed hierarchies and binaries based on class and race. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Between 1842 and 1845, Nathanial Hawthorne and Sophia Peabody Hawthorne called Old Manse home as they began their newly wedded life in Concord, Massachusetts; the stories Hawthorne would then publish in Mosses from an Old Manse and Other Stories (1846), consist of tales written and edited within the walls of Old Manse, therefore impressing the architecture of the structure—and its gardens—on to the collected short stories. Looking to tales like "Rappaccini's Daughter" and "The Birthmark," I intend to triangulate these ecogothic narratives with the physical built form of Old Manse and its gardens, along with the social function and domestic space(s) within both fictional narratives and Old Manse's rooms and outdoor spaces. If gardening aids the newlyweds in defining domesticity and home in Concord, then how does the ecogothic present an alternative form of domesticity—of cultivating dangerous and poisonous gardens? As previous scholars have posited landscape itself as being a cultural artifact worthy of interrogation, I aim to provide an additional archival consideration of the Hawthornes' material, lived interaction with Old Manse as creating both current and counter-current narratives of the environment and ecology within Mosses from an Old Manse and Other Stories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Employing an ecogothic approach, this article examines how Nathaniel Hawthorne, in "Roger Malvin's Burial" and "The Man of Adamant," portrays an American Gothic landscape scattered with stones that function as agentic entities charged with uncanny purpose. Hawthorne engages in a compelling gothic geology, one in which literal and figurative rocks, as well as a host of other instances of lithic imagery, figure not as static scenery but as dynamic and deeply meaningful participants in the tale. In these and other of Hawthorne's ecogothic stories, stones variously merge with and emerge from the characters themselves, who become absorbed, at times literally, into the wilderness. Ultimately, the author analyzes Hawthorne's portrayal of the often intimate and profound relationship between stone and humanity, paying special attention to formulations in which characters not only obsess over stones and what they represent but also come to absorb, mirror, and intersect with their materiality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The focus of my inquiry are environmentally inflected metaphors and discourses of toxicity which inform the contemporary North American posthuman lyric. This provisional generic category of the posthuman lyric has been inspired by the recent shift from an anthropocentric understanding of lyric subjectivities to a biocentric perspective which repositions human epistemologies in relation to more-than-human matter. The posthuman angle questions the concept of the sovereign human self, stressing transversal ontologies, open to inter-agential exchanges, diverse biosemiotic processes and communication loops. My primary interest is in poetic representations of the human body as a transversal, toxic, catastrophe- and death-haunted wasteland. The volumes chosen to problematize those processes are Allison Cobb's After We All Died (2016), an elegiac meditation on the dying human species and anthropogenic change, and Adam Dickinson's Anatomic (2018), which probes the leaky perimeters of the chemical self using an electronic microscope and burden tests of the poet's own bodily tissues. The posthumanist angle which informs the analyses is supplemented with an ecoGothic one, as both critical paradigms can be seen as interrogatory discourses which probe human fears and hopes concerning the "edge of the human" and the recognition of non-human agency. Within the ecoGothic framework, nature is seen as "a contested site"--a "space of crisis," where human and non-human ecologies interact and co-produce meaning. This double lens will be used for the study of posthuman imaginaries and Anthropocene affects employed by Dickinson and Cobb. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Revista Canaria de Estudios Ingleses is the property of Universidad de La Laguna and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Namwali Serpell's The Old Drift (2019) yokes together human, technological and ecological shifts in a sinister speculative register. While it seemingly corresponds to the posthuman Gothic, this framing is insufficient to describe gothic presentations of the postcolony where people are treated as inhuman surplus. Posthumanist approaches risk reinscribing the dehumanizing discourses that sustain coloniality as a social and environmental organization. The novel presents a two-fold decolonial critique. First, it irreverently rehearses Eurocentric Zambian history and the gothic tropes that enlivened it, only to decentre this account for a decolonial aetiology voiced by a mosquito hive mind. Second, given that history is a story of how the 'human' came to be, the figures of biological excess unsettle the colonial category 'human.' These interwoven strands of decolonial critique unseat colonial evolutionary teleology in favour of a plural, multispecies aetiology, best read through a decolonial ecoGothic lens that exposes coloniality as both an ecological and social project. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

N.K. Jemisin's critically acclaimed Broken Earth trilogy examines life in a post-apocalyptic alternate universe after a planet is cracked, bleeding and about to die. The trilogy does not seek to redeem the earth or a fractured environment. Rather, the novels demonstrate the ways in which characters develop, dissolve and mutually destroy or support each other. Jemisin's conception of nature is unique and almost antithetical to human survival, but the roots of this destruction go deep. The fractured economies and governments within this post-apocalyptic universe paint a haunting picture of a world whose geopolitics are affected by the nature it has despoiled and disintegrated. The trilogy is a fitting fable for a planet in which climate change has affected endangered species, ecosystems and world economics. I apply a postcolonial ecoGothic lens to the analysis of the Broken Earth trilogy. This postcolonial ecoGothic approach will be married to a consideration of Jason C Moore's unveiling of the Capitolocene through the lens of Donna Haraway's and Anna Tsing's positioning of a Plantationocene to look at patterns of power and domination. This paper is particularly concerned with the ways in which these patterns are related to the condition of societies living under siege and the ways in which these societies mimic patterns of colonial domination. The proposed outcome of this analysis will be to strip the layers of the Broken Earth trilogy to unearth what the narrative reveals about the environmental travails and geopolitical dissolutions that haunt our existences in what has been dubbed the Anthropocene. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Theorized in this essay as a central element of ecoGothic horror, the threat of gendered violence functions in contemporary ecoGothic texts as a revision of traditional conflicts between agential nature and the human. Examining the arthropoetic works of Fronterista poet and educator Natalie Scenters-Zapico, this essay argues that heteropatriarchy complicates understandings of "the human" in ecoGothic literature, as the already flawed idea of human agency is markedly less stable in the context of Scenters-Zapico's women speakers. In examining the ways that sexism, gender inequality, and gendered violence inhabit a large portion of the ecoGothic, this essay also charts new territory in critical scholarship by focusing on the role of insects in literary representations of the ecoGothic. Read through the lens of what I deem the Latinx ecoGothic, this essay suggests that the poems "The Hunt," "He Finds a Kissing Bug," and "Last Night I Was Killed by Man" situate their female speakers in ambivalent relationships with insects and arachnids in ways that mirror the horrors of sexualized/gendered violence as well as the actions that subjects of said violence take to resist these horrors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article offers a discussion of two eco-horror feature films, each released in 2021: Ben Wheatley's In the Earth, and Jaco Bouwer's Gaia. With a pandemic theme, both film fictions feature sentient woods and forests which infect humans with fungal spores. This is the non-human world enlisting human collaboration. Both films break the mould of the traditional eco-horror; invariably, the latter dramatizes how the natural world avenges itself on humankind. This storytelling mode involves the use of catastrophe narratives. Elizabeth Parker has explored the alternative genre, the 'ecoGothic' (2020), which stimulates ambiguous emotional responses to human–non-human hybrid forms. To date, there is little scholarship which analyses such hybrids through the lens of queer ecology. Therefore, I will bring Timothy Morton's theory of queer ecology (2010), dark ecology (2007) and his concept of the spectral non-human world (2017) into dialogue with Simon C. Estok's term 'the slimic imagination' (2022). My thesis is that both films engage an interaction between queer and slimic narratives in order to undo the catastrophe narrative. Queer slime is that which destabilizes gender binaries as a means of creating uneasy but intimate collaborations between the human and non-human world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is an ecocritical reading of the Swedish television series Jordskott. I discuss the effects in the series produced by the combination of the Nordic Noir's style and narrative techniques with elements of other genres, especially Gothic horror. I argue that through the contemporary reworking of the centuries-old Nordic mythology, Jordskott demonstrates how the aggressive powers of nature in Gothic narratives can no more be conventionally explained by referring to the pagan, pre-Christian beliefs, but need to be reconceived in light of the relentless environmental devastation brought about by humankind. The link unveiled between natural ecology and cultural mythology allows the series to surpass the limitations of the regionally informed folkloric story and to evolve into an ecological cautionary tale of global significance.

The intention of the article is to examine Stephen Graham Jones' most recent novel The Only Good Indians (2020) from combined ecogothic and postcolonial perspectives. The central concept informing the analyses is that of Third Space, as formulated by Homi Bhabha in The Location of Culture, and adapted by the spatial turn critic, Edward W. Soja in Thirdspace. Marking the onto-epistemological condition of in-betweenness, openness and ambivalent cultural identities, Third Space will be employed here to interrogate hybrid interspaces and generic dislocations in Jones' new novel. As will be argued, Jones rewrites the Gothic slasher with a view of unsettling the inherited paradigms of thought, identity and representation. The writer reclaims the conventions and tropes of the genre, such as supernatural figures and events, the return of the repressed past, delayed revenge, and excessive acts of violence, and fuses them with the Native American settings, temporalities, tropes of spirituality and modes of storytelling. Jones' novel, as we would like to propose, undermines any claims of a coherent identity and turns the Gothic mode into Third Space, characterized by an excess of ambiguous signification and revealing entangled ontological, ethnic, ecological and cross-cultural locations of horror. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article offers an ecoGothic reading of Hawthorne's 'Young Goodman Brown' (1835) and 'Roger Malvin's Burial' (1832). It fleshes out human-nature encounters in the selected short stories to revisit the common response to nature in Hawthorne scholarship as a passive element reflecting characters' state of mind. We argue that the wilderness in both short stories is presented as a malevolent and dystopian space which is actively resistant and hostile to human intrusion. We explore the ways that nature reacts to intruders in both stories drawing on the main concepts of ecoGothic criticism. The article indicates that descriptions of the wilderness in these stories are framed in Gothic terms; nature appears as disturbed and disturbing, haunted and haunting. The gloomy wilderness of the stories generates fear in the intruders not only by its uncharted space and bewildering structure but also through the possibility of the menacing presence of the Indians. Nature in the selected stories overpowers humans, punishes them severely and reclaims its space at the end. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the pedagogical aspect of the ecoGothic elements in Ruskin Bond's fiction, particularly the three novellas chosen to be highlighted: Angry River (Flood), Dust on the Mountains (Deforestation in the Mountains) and Tiger, Tiger Burning Bright (Wildlife Conservation). Even his poems such as "The Pool" and "Parts of Old Dehra" carry the same sombre tone. This article will be analysing these stories, mapping their Gothic tropes such as 'Burkean Grief" and 'sympathy for the devil". In so doing, this article will be highlighting the pedagogical importance of Bond's work utilising an ecoGothic perspective married to a postcolonial Gothic pedagogical approach. The aim is to initiate a discourse around the pedagogical benefits of reading Ruskin Bond's novella from an ecoGothic perspective in order to inculcate an inter-disciplinary approach towards environment conservation. This article will mainly be using Gina Wisker for the postcolonial Gothic pedagogical framework and Thomas Nelson for his methodology of using education to combat ecological crises. The findings reveal that the conflict between humans and nature in Bond's fictions connect to a stronger underlying theme in Indian EcoGothic fiction in relation to climate change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I seek to present a “metaphorology” of the shipwreck through a literary example. As Hans Blumenberg has noted, the shipwreck has served as a metaphor for the contingency of human existence in Western culture. Building on Blumenberg’s ideas, I argue that modernity heightens contingency and destroys the possibility of a coherent, anthropocentric discourse. For Quentin Meillassoux, the modern outlook exposes the contingency and inhumanity of reality. Building on Meillassoux and Blumenberg’s work, I address ideas pertaining to contingency and the metaphor of modernity-as-shipwreck by engaging with Dan Simmons’ historical novel, The Terror (2007), based on events surrounding the failed Franklin Expedition of 1845-48. The sinister, frozen wastelands of the Arctic figure as the limit of both European humanity and rationality. In Simmons’ novel, the traumatic encounter with cultural otherness conjures up visions of an implosion of colonial ambitions, as the crew members are gradually consumed by both the harsh environment and the ancient Inuit ice demon Tuunbaq and must confront the indifferent frozen wastes of a mythological, gothic North. Simmons’ gothic North Pole constitutes an example of “extro-science fiction,” situated beyond the limits of all knowledge.

Examining Linda Hogan’s Power“ in the context of the ecogothic, a mode emphasizing the Western world’s desire to subdue and dominate the natural world, this paper contextualizes and analyzes changes imposed upon the natural world as the result of ecophobia. Hogan’s young female protagonist Omishto—a member of the fictional Taiga tribe—struggles to come to terms with these realities. At the same time, she learns the danger of disclosing information to Euro-American institutions, specifically courts of law. In this ecophobic world, the importance (and lack) of credence given to Indigenous testimonies and the danger of relying on static, stereotypical images of “eco- Indians” as models of environmental responsibility are brought to the fore. This article also argues that Indigenous literature is often treated in the same fashion in scholarship. In such readings, Indigenous-authored texts are expected to function as resources from which knowledge and lessons can be gleaned. The implementation of the ecogothic mode in Power“, however, thwarts such efforts on both an intratextual and an extratextual level.

Though frequently comprehended as a vehicle for social satire or post-cultural speculation, zombie fictions also demonstrably mobilize the climatic unease of the current Anthropocene. Focusing in particular upon Max Brooks's 2006 novel World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War, this article considers the complex politics which have frequently underwritten a mythical origin for pandemics in the Othered East, and their contemporary reproduction in western concerns regarding unregulated surgery and the capitalism of human tissue. The article then proposes that the deterioration of human culture consequent upon the fictional zombie pandemic interrogates the contemporary understanding of integrated nationhood and problematizes the dichotomy structured between geographically stable and refugee populations. The sudden eclipse of the competitive Anthropocene by a mindless Zombicene brings not renewal for a planet no longer supporting agriculture and industry but rather a hastening of perceived environmental collapse, where unregulated hunting and the uncontrolled burning of natural resources accelerate climatic deterioration, imperilling further the survival of residual humanity. As a type of apocalyptic fiction, the zombie narrative thus poses questions with regard to the persistence of conventional human behaviours, even in a post-capitalist environment, where the political concepts structuring nationhood have come to function as little more than a memory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Alvin Yapan’s “The Riddle of the Fowl and the Eagle” (Filipino: “Ang Bugtong ng Manok at Agila”) teases at the boundaries between the cultural, the natural, and the supernatural, in order to foreground a contemporary Philippine conundrum that elucidates an ethical concern. The story questions what it is to be human, and what it means to be so in times that are rather inhumane. In the context of this text, this is simultaneously a concern with the meaning and value of animality. Through its rhythm, the text demonstrates a contemporary tropical consciousness that simultaneously navigates the individual and the collective so as to confront ecocritical anxieties and creating a story of the ecogothic. The translation of this text therefore opens this local tropical story to current discourses involved in analyzing global ecocritical predicaments.

In this paper I argue that Curaçaoan author Tip Marugg’s use of ecogothic articulates a postcolonial sense of insular alienation for his white protagonists in Weekend Pilgrimage (1957) and The Roar of Morning (1988). His depiction of the Dutch Caribbean environment as decadent and hostile facilitates an atmosphere in which his characters become untethered from the structures that empowered them. Marugg’s narrative techniques regarding the gothic rely on postcolonial critiques of the island of Curaçao’s racial hierarchy, the oil industry as a product of sustained colonization for the sake of globalization, and tourism as a product of neocolonialism. The environment’s opposition abounds through images of haunting winds, suicidal birds, sea monsters, and widespread destruction that serve to criticise societal changes that isolate the protagonists. Because I suggest that Marugg’s ecocriticism is implicated within a larger question of belonging as it pertains to race and class in Curaçao, I will conclude by considering how his contemporary Frank Martinus Arion employs nature in Double Play (1998). That is to say, whereas Marugg’s white protagonists are often the target of the island’s ecosystem, Arion’s interaction with the natural environment espouses a sentiment of belonging for his Afro-Curaçaoan protagonist that ultimately positions Afro-Curaçaoans as stewards of the island’s future.

This paper interrogates the connection between entities that hover in the liminal state between life and death (such as vampires and spirits) and the manner in which these entities relate to Alaya Dawn Johnson's conjurings of alternate political structures and hierarchies in her Spirit Binders series. Johnson's alternate hierarchies are compelling primarily because they are both flawed and liminal. These hierarchies contain gateways between life and death, between material reality and spiritual reality. An ecoGothic lens is applied to these texts as they deal with climate-related disasters and the ways in which the texts instigate not just heroism but also monstrosity. In Gothic fiction, supernatural tropes such as the Vampire, spirits, and intermediaries are often signposts towards psychological states such as Terror and its relation to the Sublime. In Gothic fiction, very often, vampires, spirits and other similar creatures are connected to a hierarchy or community of sorts. A postcolonial Gothic reading of Gothicized texts, however, interrogates the power relations, the sense of haunting underscoring the text as well as the discourse of Terror in relation to the Other. I argue that Johnson's writing enables the reader to peer in between the veils of life and death to unearth the darker sides of human nature, but very often these glimpses are not just about personal choices. These glimpses reveal strategies and missteps that guide the ways in which those hierarchies shape those choices, which Johnson then subverts in her tales. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this essay, I discuss Darren Aronofsky’s 2017 feature film mother! in the context of an intersectional approach to ecofeminism and the American gothic genre. By exploring the histories of ecofeminism, the significances of the ecogothic, and the Puritan origins of American gothic fiction, I read the movie as a reiteration of both a global ecophobic and an American national narrative, whose biblical symbolism is rooted in the patriarchal logic of Christian theology, American history, female suffering, and environmental crisis. mother! emerges as an example of a distinctly American ecofeminist gothic through its focus on and subversion of the essentialist equation of women and nature as feminized others, by dipping into the archives of feminist literary criticism, and by raising ecocritical awareness of the dangers of climate change across socio-cultural and anthropocentric categories. Situating Aronofsky’s film within traditions of American gothic and ecofeminist literatures from colonial times to the present moment, I show how mother! moves beyond a maternalist fantasy rooted in the past and towards a critique of the androcentric ideologies at the core of the 21st-century Anthropocene.

Revolving around the notion of climate change as the premise of life extinction scenarios, with all the anxieties activated by the prospect of humanity's end, Solar, McEwan's novel of 2010, captures - in a post-Gothic narrative frame - the global debates around modes of producing alternative energy that may ensure the survival of the planet. Filtered through the cultural lens of parody and pastiche, the Gothic mode is accommodated in Ian McEwan's narrative of climate catastrophe within the threefold casing of (post)domestic Gothic, Globalgothic and Ecogothic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the publication of Amitav Ghosh's The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable in 2016 (Chicago University Press), critical attention has been focused on the issues that Ghosh raises in respect to the relation between the art of fiction and climate change. Ghosh draws his argumentation in part on Dipesh Chakrabarty's "The Climate of History: Four Theses". This paper explores the degree to which novels of leading English language writers, such as Barbara Kingsolver's Flight Behavior and Cormac McCarthy's The Road, might be considered representatives of that new genre known as the Ecogothic, a type of the Neogothic. The work draws on the distinction that Chakrabarty makes between the Vi-chian verum-factum and recent accounts of the working of the human in the natural world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay reads Hanya Yanagihara’s first novel as an example of postcolonial dark archaeology. Drawing from Timothy Morton’s dark ecology and Rob Nixon’s slow violence, I argue the figure of sexual abuse and exploitation complicates notions of pristine indigeneity and corrupt anthropology, critically confusing notions of cultural, physical and ideological pollution, contamination, discovery and knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]