Gothic Utterance

• The book puts major and familiar American writers (e.g. Edgar Allan Poe and Harriet Beecher Stowe) into conversation with writers less familiar to a majority of readers (e.g. Victor Séjour and Phoebe Yates Pember). • In this way it suggests new forms of connection between these writers, and above all argues that a share preoccupation among America’s writers of Gothic fiction can be found in their sustained attention to the important work of the voices of the dead, dying, ghostly, monstrous, nonhuman, and Othered. • Further, the book demonstrates that a “Gothic utterance” appears even in work that is not otherwise a Gothic fiction, thereby suggesting the enduring and important presence of Gothic utterance to the national imagination. • It offers a detailed readings of key American geographies, including the American frontier, the southern plantation and the Civil War battlefield. • Gothic Utterance also offers a sustained consideration of the intersection of Gothic fiction, ethics, affect, and meaning.

Gothic Utterance explores the vital role played by haunted and haunting voices in American Gothic literature produced between the Revolutionary War and the close of the nineteenth century, discussing pressing questions of national identity and subjecthood, and emphasising the ethical value of listening to unsettling or distressing voices.The Gothic has always been interested in strange utterances and unsettling voices: from half-heard ghostly murmurings and the admonitions of the dead, to the terrible cries of the monstrous nonhuman. Gothic Utterance offers the first book-length study of the role such voices play in the Gothic tradition, exploring their prominence and importance in the American literature produced between the Revolutionary War and the close of the nineteenth century. This book argues that the American Gothic foregrounds the overpowering affect and distressing significations of the voices of the dead, dying, abjected, marginalised or nonhuman, in order to undertake a sustained interrogation of what it means to be and speak as an American in this period. The American Gothic imagines new forms of relation between speaking subjects, positing more inclusive and expansive forms of community. Gothic Utterance also emphasises the ethical demands attending our encounters with Gothic voices: the Gothic suggests that how we choose to hear and respond to these voices says much about our relationship with the world around us, its inhabitants - dead or otherwise - and the limits of our own subjectivity and empathy.