The Forest and the EcoGothic

The Deep Dark Woods in the Popular Imagination

Elizabeth Parker author

Format:Hardback

Publisher:Springer Nature Switzerland AG

Published:14th Feb '20

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The Forest and the EcoGothic cover


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.


“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)

ISBN: 9783030351533

Dimensions: unknown

Weight: unknown

308 pages

1st ed. 2020