Gothic Things: Dark Enchantment and Anthropocene Anxiety

Gothic Things: Dark Enchantment and Anthropocene Anxiety offers a new materialist analysis of the Gothic, highlighting its focus on "ominous matter" and "thing power." It argues that the Gothic has always been about what happens when objects assume mysterious animacy or potency and when human beings are reduced to the status of just one thing among many. By exploring how the Gothic insistently decenters the human, Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock reveals human beings to be enmeshed in networks of human and nonhuman forces mostly outside of their control. The Gothic offers a dark reflection of the contemporary "nonhuman turn," expressing a twenty-first-century structure of feeling undergirded by anxiety over the fate of the human.

Format: Hardback
Length: 240 pages
Publication date: 04 July 2023
Publisher: Fordham University Press

Offering a novel approach to the Gothic genre, Gothic Things: Dark Enchantment and Anthropocene Anxiety delves into a groundbreaking materialist analysis, shedding light on the enduring fascination with "ominous matter" and "thing power" since its inception in the eighteenth century. Through chapters that explore gothic bodies, spaces, books, and other objects, Gothic Things argues that the Gothic has consistently been about the mysterious animacy or potency that emerges when objects assume significance, and the reduction of human beings to mere entities among many other powerful beings. By examining how the Gothic consistently decenters the human, Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock unveils the intricate web of human and nonhuman forces that often govern human existence, highlighting the limitations of human control.

Gothic Things thus repositiones the Gothic as the uncanny counterpart to twenty-first-century critical and cultural theory, lurking beneath the surface, occasionally surfacing, as it hauntingly explores the interactions between human beings and their environment. Within these pages, the Gothic provides a dark reflection of the contemporary "nonhuman turn," expressing a twenty-first-century structure of feeling underpinned by anxiety about the fate of humanity: spectrality, monstrosity, and apocalypse. Instead of offering hope, the Gothic, as Weinstock explains, has served as a philosophical meditation on human relations with the nonhuman, raising profound questions about how we can challenge anthropocentric thinking and strive for a more harmonious coexistence with the world around us.

Dimension: 229 x 152 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781531503413