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This book examines the textual representations of emotions, fear in particular, through the lens of Stoic thought and their impact on depictions of power, gender, and agency. It first draws attention to the role and significance of fear, and cognate emotions, in the tyrant's psyche, and then goes on to explore how these emotions, in turn, shape the wider narratives. The focus is on the lengthy epics of Valerius Flaccus'Argonautica, Statius'Thebaid, and Silius Italicus'Punica. All three poems are obsessed with men in power with no power over themselves, a marked concern that carries a strong Senecan fingerprint. Seneca's influence on post-Neronian epic can be felt beyond his plays. His Epistles and other prose works prove particularly illuminating for each of the poet's gendered treatment of the relationship between power and emotion. By adopting a Roman Stoic perspective, both philosophical and cultural, this study brings together a cluster of major ideas to draw meaningful connections and unlock new readings.

Fear seems to be at the heart of both present-day and past forms of anger, an anger that is produced in and by discourse and in and through translation. It seems to be spreading globally, so much so that we are now living in the age of anger. Fear is a hot topic on the agenda nowadays, both in the news and in academia. The present collection of chapters by ten TS researchers focuses on the relationship between translation as an ambivalent practice and fear. The chapters deal with various discursive practices and disciplines within different contexts: geographical (Middle East, Lampedusa, France, and Portugal); political and historical (the Portuguese dictatorship and its censorial regime, the colonial war); and literary translation (poetry, novels, and dark literature).

Die Reihe Sprache und Wissen (SuW) ist eine Plattform für hochwertige Arbeiten zur germanistischen Linguistik mit interdisziplinärer Ausstrahlungskraft. Sie greift aktuelle Tendenzen der Wissensgesellschaft unter linguistischer Perspektive auf, um zu zeigen, wie gesellschaftliches und fachspezifisches Wissen durch Sprache erst entsteht und dadurch perspektiviert wird. Die sprachwissenschaftliche Betrachtung diskursiv geprägter Wissensformate soll auf neuartige Weise das Fach und die an Sprache interessierten Wissenschaften voranbringen.Die Reihe versammelt Arbeiten mit semantischen, pragmatischen und grammatischen Beschreibungsansätzen unter varietätenspezifischem sowie text- und diskurslinguistischem Erkenntnisinteresse. Wissenschaftlicher Beirat:Markus HundtWolf-Andreas LiebertThomas Spranz-FogasyBerbeli WanningIngo H. WarnkeMartin Wengeler

In diesem Sammelband werden die vielfältigen Zusammenhänge von Angst und Sprechen untersucht: die Merkmale, Möglichkeiten und Grenzen der Vermittlung von Angst in Gesprächen, Literatur und Film sowie in bestimmten sozialen und historischen Konstellationen. Dabei geht es darum, wie Erfahrungen der Angst sowohl auf individueller wie auch auf kollektiver Ebene zur Sprache gebracht werden können. Hierzu präsentieren die Beiträgerinnen und Beiträger aktuelle Ansätze der Linguistik, Literatur-, Film-, Medien- und Geschichtswissenschaft sowie der Psychologie, Neurologie und Soziologie. Diskutiert werden innovative Wege der Diagnostik und Therapie sowie der Diskursanalyse und ästhetischen Analyse, die sich auf das Sprechen und Verständigen über Angst beziehen, ebenso wie auf das angstinduzierte Verstummen und Schweigen.

W moich badaniach nad literaturą i kulturą śląskiego (i niemieckiego) baroku szczególną uwagę poświęcam dyskursom antropologicznym epoki, współkształtującym światy codzienności, a także ich literackiemu przedstawianiu. […] Literatura baroku pokazuje wyraźnie, jak antropologia strachu współokreślała ludzkie życie oraz historię relacji płci w owym czasie. Pod pojęciem antropologii strachu rozumiem obraz człowieka i koncepcje płci, jakie rozwinęły się w epoce zdominowanej wojną trzydziestoletnią tudzież towarzyszącymi jej egzystencjalnymi doświadczeniami i przeżyciami. […] Ramę moich rozważań w niniejszym studium stanowią z jednej strony dyskurs płci, w którym werbalizuje się strach przed kobietą oraz – z drugiej – dyskurs autorstwa, w którym eksponuje się wyraźnie strach kobiet przed pisaniem. W tak oznaczonym polu badawczym znalazły się dyskurs starości i ciała, śmierci i miłości. Aktualne interdyscyplinarne badania nad wczesną nowożytnością jasno pokazały konieczność re-wizji wielu dotychczasowych ustaleń, interpretacji i stanowisk wobec dyskursów epoki. Najważniejszym dezyderatem badawczym jest przy tym pluralistyczne spojrzenie na zjawiska i procesy zachodzące we wszystkich obszarach kultury tej epoki, aby w napięciu i kontrowersji pomiędzy autorytatywnością i pluralizmem dotychczasowych pozycji ukazać jej dynamikę. Szczególnie interesujące są dla mnie w tym kontekście tzw. przestrzenie nieuwagi, zatem obszary traktowane dotąd jako historycznie irrelewantne dla kultury. Pozwalają one bowiem poznać i opisać procesy uznawane za normatywnie i autorytarnie regulowane, a które w perspektywie pluralistycznej jawią się jako otwarte i kontrowersyjne. ze Wstępu

Pourquoi la peur reste-t-elle prise en charge par des écrivains africains de générations différentes? Quelles configurations sociopolitiques se dessinent lorsqu'on passe de l'État espéré de droit à l'État d'insécurité absolue? Avoir peur serait-il un paradigme essentiel de lisibilité de l'expérience postcoloniale? Partant d'une analyse transversale du roman africain de langue française, les auteurs mettent en lumière la vulnérabilité de sujets qui, suppliciés par des épidémies ou des catastrophes de tous ordres, vivant dans la hantise d'être muselés, arrêtés, torturés par les « forces de l'ordre », milices, bandes criminelles et terroristes islamistes infestant des autocraties tropicales, sont promis à une fin tragique. En offrant des pistes essentielles pour l'interprétation de l'insécurité comme signe, cet essai construit des hypothèses sur le rôle de l'État et le sens du politique en contexte de déréliction. Il détermine également les conditions de possibilités d'une véritable émancipation dans une conjoncture où les autoritarismes les plus brutaux sont pris de panique.

The Pathogenesis of Fear gathers together diverse conversations about cultural constructions of the monstrous. Interdisciplinary essays map the margins of monstrosity as follows: the cannibalistic paradox in Kleist's late-Romantic Penthesilea; intersections of the monstrous-feminine and the new Victorian psycho-physiology of consciousness in George Eliot's early novels; the monster-formed citizens of Dickensian and later dystopias; the killing of African Americans targeted as monstrous entities in US cities; the post-human anguish of a television zombie-world; the monstrous mutilations of a Spanish horror film; psychosocial aberration in Martin Millar's werewolf fiction; the demonization of the Other on the war-torn streets of Ireland; Derridean devouring sovereignty. Discursively correlated with different categories of body and mind, monstrosity, these essays argue, persists in taking many forms. Contributors are Elizabeth Hollis Berry, Niculae Gheran, Sarah Harris, Fiona Harris-Ramsby and Mubarak Muhammad, Michaela Marková, Kimberley McMahon Coleman, Judith Rahn, Cindy Smith and Marita Vyrgioti.

Enlightenment – both the phenomenon specific to the eighteenth century and the continuing trend in Western thought – is an attempt to dispel ignorance, achieve mastery of a potentially hostile environment, and contain fear of the unknown by promoting science and rationality. Enlightenment is often accompanied and challenged by countercultures such as German Romanticism, which explored the nature of fear and deployed it as a corrective to the excesses of rationalism. The Aesthetics of Fear in German Romanticism uncovers the formative role this movement played in the development of dark or negative aesthetics. Recovering a missing chapter in the history of the aesthetics of fear, Paola Mayer illustrates that Romanticism was a crucial transitional phase between the eighteenth-century sublime and the early twentieth-century uncanny. Mayer puts literature and philosophy in dialogue, examining how German Romantic literature employed narratives of fear to radicalize and then subvert the status quo in society, culture, and science. She traces the development of this aesthetic from its inception with pre-Romantics such as Jean Paul Richter to its end in Joseph von Eichendorff's critical retrospective, and juxtaposes canonical authors such as E.T.A. Hoffmann – the father of the modern fantastic – with writers who have previously been ignored. Today, when the dark side of science looms in the foreground, The Aesthetics of Fear in German Romanticism points to the power of a literary movement to construct competing currents of thought.

This volume brings together essays that examine a vast gamut of different contemporary cultural manifestations of fear, anxiety, horror, and terror. Topics range from the feminine sublime in American novels to the monstrous double in horror fiction, (in)security at music festivals, the uncanny in graphic novels, epic heroes'Being-towards-death and authenticity, atrocity and history in Central European art, the theme of old age in absurdist literature, and iterations of the'home invasion'subgenre in post-9/11 popular culture. This diversity of insights and methodologies ensures a kaleidoscopic look at a cluster of phenomena and experiences that often manage to both be immediately and universally recognizable and defy straightforward categorization or even description. Contributors are Emily-Rose Carr, Ghada Saad Hassan, Woodrow Hood, María Ibáñez-Rodríguez, Nicole M. Jowsey, Marta Moore, Pedro Querido and Ana Romão.

Over the last two decades, research in cultural geography and landscape studies has influenced many humanities fields, including Classics, and has increasingly drawn our attention to the importance of spaces and their contexts, both geographical and social: how spaces are described by language, what spaces are used for by individuals and communities, and how language, use, and the passage of time invest spaces with meaning. In addition to this ‘spatial'turn in scholarship, recent years have also seen an ‘emotive'turn – an increased interest in the study of emotion in literature.Many works on landscape in classical antiquity focus on themes such as the sacred and the pastoral and the emotions such spaces evoke, such as (respectively) feelings of awe or tranquillity in settings both urban and rural. Far less scholarship has been generated by the locus terribilis, the space associated with negative emotions because of the bad things that happen there. In short, the recent ‘emotive'turn in humanities studies has so far largely neglected several of the more negative emotions, including anxiety, fear, terror, and dread.The papers in this volume focus on those neglected negative emotions, especially dread – and they do so while treating many types of space, including domestic, suburban, rural and virtual, and while covering many genres and authors, including the epic poems of Homer, Greek tragedy, Roman poetry and historiography, medical writing, paradoxography and the short story.

Narrativas del miedo: Terror en obras literarias, cinemáticas y televisivas de Latinoamérica es una colección de ensayos escritos en inglés y en español en los que se analizan distintas representaciones del miedo como un elemento estructural y simbólico en obras literarias, teatrales y visuales de Argentina, Chile, Brasil, Colombia, Costa Rica, República Dominicana y Venezuela. Este libro ofrece una coherente y comprensiva visión de conjunto que abre una discusión sobre una de las más problemáticas consecuencias de la violencia: el miedo. A los largo de los últimos dos siglos, los países de América Latina han experimentado numerosos conflictos tales como guerras, revoluciones, dictaduras, narcotráfico, desplazamientos, exilios, etc. Existen abundantes estudios críticos sobre estas problemáticas, así como también sobre sus representaciones literarias y cinematográficas. Sin embargo, es muy poco lo que se ha dicho sobre el miedo que distintos tipos de violencia infligen en la sociedad, los individuos y sobre cómo estos fenómenos condicionan las representaciones artísticas y literarias. El valor y la originalidad de este volumen yace en el hecho de que enfoca su atención en esta fuerza emocional tan profundamente integrada en la producción de novelas, cuentos, teatro, películas y cómics en América Latina.

Die Phantastik etablierte die Angst vor dem Übernatürlichen in der Literatur. In vormodernen literarischen Texten sucht man hingegen vergeblich nach dem gezielt evozierten Horror. Er findet sich stattdessen in christlichen Exempla: Sie evozieren den Schrecken aus didaktischen Gründen. Von diesem Befund ausgehend, wird die in der Forschung konsequent negierte Bedeutung des christlichen Wunderbaren für die Phantastik bis ins 20. Jh. erörtert.

This title, originally published in 1992, presents an assessment of Poe's short stories that treat horror, and more specifically how he manipulated the conventions of that horror to register subtly on the fears and phobias of his reading audiences. Short-stories examined include The Black Cat, Hop-Frog and Morella. This title also explores the theories of Stephen King and Benjamin Rush on the horror genre. This title will be of great interest to students of American Literature.

This book is about an emotion constantly present in human culture and history: fear. It is also a book about literature and medicine, two areas of human endeavour that engage with fear most acutely. The essays in this volume explore fear in various literary and medical manifestations, in the Western World, from medieval to modern times. It is divided into two parts. The first part, Treating Fear, examines fear in medical history, and draws from theology, medicine, philosophy, and psychology, to offer an account of how fear shifts in Western understanding from the Middle Ages to Modern times. The second part, Writing Fear, explores fear as a rhetorical and literary force, offering an account of how it is used and evoked in distinct literary periods and texts. This coherent and fascinating collection will appeal to medical historians, literary critics, cultural theorists, medical humanities'scholars and historians of the emotions.

Bret Easton Ellis is one of the most famous and controversial contemporary American novelists. Since the publication of his opus primum, Less than Zero (1985), critics and readers alike have become fascinated with the author's style and topics; which were extremely appealing to the MTV generation that acknowledged him as their cultural guru. As a result, an early review of the novel declared, “American literature has never been so sexy”.In this book, Ellis'novels and collections of short stories are analyzed, focusing mainly on the role fear, trauma and paranoia play in these texts. These aspects are fundamental not only to Bret Easton Ellis'literature but also to contemporary American literature (Don DeLillo, John Barth or Thomas Pynchon's novels, just to name some quintessential examples within postmodern American letters, cannot be understood or defined without reference to fear and paranoia). More importantly, they play a major role in American culture and society.

Outstanding, in-depth scholarship by renowned literary critics; great starting point for students seeking an introduction to the theme and the critical discussions surrounding it.

At a time when the mass media insist on bombarding us with news about natural, political and economic disasters, words, ideas and images associated with such “crises” and “catastrophes” shape to a great extent collective memory and current imagination. Fear and Fantasy in a Global World seeks to stir the debate on the processes and meanings of, as well as on the relations between, fear and fantasy in the globalized world. Collective fears and fantasies are analysed from a number of cross-disciplinary perspectives, promoted by the epistemological underpinnings of comparative literature. In various ways and from different disciplinary angles, the 17 essays here gathered respond to and scrutinize key questions related to the imaginaries of fear and fantasy, as well as their relations to trauma, crisis, anxiety, and representations of both the conscious and the unconscious.Contributors: Alexandra Hills, Ana Filipa Prata, Brecht de Groote, Christin Grunert, Christopher Bollas, Daniela Di Pasquale, David Vichnar, Edith Beltrán, Gero Guttzeit, Hande Gurses, Harriet Hulme, James Rushing Daniel, João Pedro da Costa, Margarita García Candeira, Marija Sruk, Martijn Boven, and Ortwin de Graef.

Das Buch behandelt die Darstellung der Angst in Rilkes Werk Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge. Die Angst ist ein Leitmotiv des Buches. Im Zentrum steht die Angsterfahrung Maltes in der Großstadt bzw. in Paris. Es hat einen klaren theoretischen Ansatz, nämlich die philosophische Betrachtung des Angstphänomens von den Philosophen des Existenzialismus wie Søren Kierkegaard, Martin Heidegger und Jean Paul Sartre. Die Angst wird von diesen Philosophen als Negation, Abwesenheit, aber auch als ein dialektisches Korrelat zum Sein betrachtet. Angst als Grundzug des Seins wird in diesen Philosophien unterschiedlich akzentuiert - als Überbleibsel des Sündenfalls und als gegenstands- oder referenzlos (Kierkegaard), als ontologische bzw. existenzielle Angst vor dem Geworfensein in der Welt (Heidegger) sowie als ein „reines reflexives Ergreifen des Selbst“ (Sartre)

The central concern of the book is the impact of global terror networks and state counterterrorism on twentieth-century fiction. A unique contribution of this book is the comparative approach, as opposed to the single author focus of most of the edited collections on terrorism in literature.

In Figures de l'épouvante grecques de l'antiquité au présent, Maria Patera examines an unfamiliar aspect of the Greek pedagogy of fear, illustrated by narratives about four Greek terrifying figures: Lamia, Mormô, Gellô and Empousa. These female bogeys belong to the children's world. Each of those figures provokes fear in a particular way, according to its own characteristics (metamorphosis, hybridity, cannibalism, etc.). By means of a diachronic comparison of the ancient figures with their Byzantine and modern Greek namesakes, each of them is assigned a proper position within its specific historical, cultural, and religious context.Dans Figures de l'épouvante grecques de l'antiquité au présent, Maria Patera examine un aspect mal connu de la pédagogie grecque, celui de la peur, illustré à travers des récits principalement destinés aux enfants à propos des épouvantails Lamia, Mormô, Gellô et Empousa. Ces quatre figures féminines appartiennent aux chambres enfantines et aux contes de bonnes femmes. Chacune d'entre elles matérialise un aspect de l'épouvante à travers ses façons d'agir et ses traits caractéristiques (métamorphose, hybridité, anthropophagie, etc.). Un examen diachronique permet de comparer les personnages anciens à leurs homonymes byzantins et néo-grecs et de déterminer leurs fonctions respectives dans chaque contexte historique, religieux et culturel donné.

Choice Outstanding Academic Title 2014This book examines the connections between the growth of'terror fiction'- the genre now known as'Gothic'- in the late eighteenthcentury, and the simultaneous appearance of the conceptual origins of'terrorism'as a category of political action. In the 1790s, Crawford argues, fourinter-connected bodies of writing arose in Britain: the historical mythology ofthe French Revolution, the political rhetoric of'terrorism', the genre ofpolitical conspiracy theory, and the literary genre of Gothic fiction, known atthe time as'terrorist novel writing'. All four bodies of writing drew heavilyupon one another, in order to articulate their shared sense of the radical andmonstrous otherness of the extremes of human evil, a sense which was quite newto the eighteenth century, but has remained central to the ways in which wehave thought and written about evil and violence ever since.

Scholars have often focused on understanding Aristotle's poetic theory, and particularly the concept of catharsis in the Poetics, as a response to Plato's critique of pity in the Republic. However, this book shows that, while Greek thinkers all acknowledge pity and some form of fear as responses to tragedy, each assumes for the two emotions a different purpose, mode of presentation and, to a degree, understanding. This book reassesses expressions of the emotions within different tragedies and explores emotional responses to and discussions of the tragedies by contemporary philosophers, providing insights into the ethical and social implications of the emotions.

Das Unheimliche wird in dieser Untersucbung zu E.T.A Hoffmanns ‘Nachtstücken'einmal als eines verstanden, das nicht nur in den Motiven und Themen, sondern vorwiegend in der hoffmannschen Poetik verankert ist. Von der Analyse soll keines der ‘Nachtstücke'ausgeschlossen werden, die konsequente Einheit des Zyklus lässt sich an einer Untersuchung des Unheimlichen gleichsam en passant aufzeigen. Der Autor Hoffmann liefert selbst bezüglich des Fantastischen und Unheimlichen in seinen Erzählungen reiche poetologische Hinweise, meist in Form von Diskussionen fiktiver Freunde im Vorfeld oder Anschluss an eine Geschichte, welche sich weit aufschlussreicher als die Theorien über das literarische Fantastische anderer Autoren auf seine Erzähltexte anwenden lassen. Ausgehend von der Annahme, dass alleinig der Text einer Erzählung die schauerliche Wirkung übertragen und beim Leser entstehen lassen kann, soll darauf eine detaillierte textuelle Analyse, die jeweils bei den beiden von der Forschung am eklatantesten gemiedenen Novellen ‘Ignaz Denner'und ‘Das Gelübde'ansetzt, der Frage nachgehen, wo das Unheimliche im Erzähltext manifest wird, was genau uns denn in diesen Geschichten erschauern macht und welche sprachlichen Mittel der Zeit-, Figuren- und Raumgestaltung entscheidend dazu beitragen. Sicherlich trifft man dabei in allen ‘Nachtstücken'auf grelle Schauerelemente. Sie drehen sich beständig um Wahnsinn, Selbstmord, Totschlag, Satanismus, Revenants, dunkle Schlösser, Automate, Trugbilder und geheimnisvolle, ‚magnetische'Phänomene. Ihre wahrlich beängstigende Wirkung jedoch, das zeigt der dritte Teil der Untersuchung, entsteht im Wesentlichen durch die genannten Erzähltechniken - die perspektivische, den Leser in extremer Nähe zu den Figuren haltende Erzählweise, ein stetes, über Beglaubigungsstrategien bewirktes In-die-Irre-Führen desselben, durch Brüche, die bei gleichzeitiger Verrätselung und Illusionsaufrechterhaltung, die Ironie, die Gemachtheit und die Inszenierung der Erzählung offen legen sowie durch stets vieldeutige Enden, wo Fragen ungeklärt bleiben und die über Staunen und Schrecken auch nach dem Schliessen des Buchdeckels verunsichern, jegliche Vereindeutigung verweigern und den Leser somit im Unheimlichen zurücklassen. Die Erzähltexte der ‘Nachtstücke'sind ein bewusst und berechnend inszeniertes Verwirrspiel, das über die Themen der Erzählungen, und, sich hierin bereits von der Romantik abhebend, stärker noch über die Sprache, in der es verfasst ist, laut wird und über das das Unheimliche, gleich einem Automat, eine Art Eigenleben erlangt, das gerade nur im Rahmen von Literatur und über besagte Erzähltechniken funktionieren kann. Hoffmann selbst ist gewissermassen Mechanicus, Automat-Fabrikant und gleicht den in unzähligen seiner Werke auftauchenden Charakteren, die für die Verführung der Protagonisten durch die von ihnen hergestellten Trugbilder und Maschinen-Menschen verantwortlich sind. Seinen Wunsch, selbst einmal ein Automat zu verfertigen, den Hoffmann seinem Tagebuch am 2.10.1803 einschreibt, wird er sich mit seinen literarischen Texten weit wirkungsvoller und langlebiger erfüllen, als es ein richtiger Automat je gewesen wäre.

The tropes of fear, horror and terror have come to play a dominant role the analysis of contemporary social life. The predominance of fear, as the frame through which we narrativize experience, can be perceived readily echoing across various fields from theoretical research, to the mass media, to the quotidian. Despite the commonly held view that fear is a primitive and universal affect, its definition, potential value, and perceived effects vary wildly in each instance.From literary theory to psychoanalysis to politics to philosophy, this collection of research attempts to both flesh-out these tropes and to complexify them. Individually, the essays reflect a diversity of approaches to the constellation: fear, horror and terror. Taken as a whole, they produce the ground for an analysis of the dominance of fear.

New Yorker James Baldwin once declared that a black man can look at a map of the United States, contemplate the area south of the Mason-Dixon Line, and thus scare himself to death. In The Scary Mason-Dixon Line, renowned literary scholar Trudier Harris explores why black writers, whether born in Mississippi, New York, or elsewhere, have consistently both loved and hated the South. Harris explains that for these authors the South represents not so much a place or even a culture as a rite of passage. Not one of them can consider himself or herself a true African American writer without confronting the idea of the South in a decisive way. Harris considers native-born black southerners Raymond Andrews, Ernest J. Gaines, Edward P. Jones, Tayari Jones, Yusef Komunyakaa, Randall Kenan, and Phyllis Alesia Perry, and nonsouthern writers James Baldwin, Sherley Anne Williams, and Octavia E. Butler. The works Harris examines date from Baldwin's Blues for Mr. Charlie (1964) to Edward P. Jones's The Known World (2003). By including Komunyakaa's poems and Baldwin's play, as well as male and female authors, Harris demonstrates that the writers'preoccupation with the South cuts across lines of genre and gender. Whether their writings focus on slavery, migration from the South to the North, or violence on southern soil, and whether they celebrate the triumph of black southern heritage over repression or castigate the South for its treatment of blacks, these authors cannot escape the call of the South. Indeed, Harris asserts that creative engagement with the South represents a defining characteristic of African American writing. A singular work by one of the foremost literary scholars writing today, The Scary Mason-Dixon Line superbly demonstrates how history and memory continue to figure powerfully in African American literary creativity.

Although Gothic writing is now seen as significant for an understanding of modernity, it is still largely characterized as a literature of fear and anxiety. Gothic and the Comic Turn argues that, partly through its desire to be taken seriously, Gothic criticism has neglected the comic doppelganger that has always inhabited the Gothic mode and which in certain texts emerges as dominant. Tracing an historical trajectory from the late Romantic period through to the present day, this book examines how varieties of comic parody and appropriation have interrogated the complexities of modern subjectivity.

Literary use of the Gothic is marked by an anxious encounter with otherness, with the dark and mysterious unknown. From its earliest manifestations in the turbulent eighteenth century, this seemingly escapist mode has provided for authors a useful ground upon which to safely confront very real fears and horrors. The essays here examine texts in which Gothic fear is relocated onto the figure of the racial and social Other, the Other who replaces the supernatural ghost or grotesque monster as the code for mystery and danger, ultimately becoming as horrifying, threatening and unknowable as the typical Gothic manifestation. The range of essays reveals that writers from many canons and cultures are attracted to the Gothic as a ready medium for expression of racial and social anxieties. The essays are grouped into sections that focus on such topics as race, religion, class, and centers of power.