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: Paperback / softback
Length: 240 pages
Publication date: 04 July 2023
Publisher: Fordham University Press

Gothic Things: Dark Enchantment and Anthropocene Anxiety offers a groundbreaking new materialist analysis of the Gothic genre, delving into its intense focus on "ominous matter" and "thing power" since its origins in the eighteenth century. Through chapters exploring gothic bodies, spaces, books, and other objects, the book argues that the Gothic has always been about the mysterious animacy and potency of objects, as well as the reduction of human beings to mere things among many. By examining how the Gothic decenters the human, Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock reveals human beings to be entangled in networks of human and nonhuman forces, largely beyond their control. Gothic Things thus resituates the Gothic as the uncanny doppelgänger of twenty-first-century critical and cultural theory, lurking beneath the surface and occasionally surfacing in discussions of human-object interactions and their environmental impact. In these pages, the Gothic offers a dark reflection of the contemporary "nonhuman turn," expressing a twenty-first-century structure of feeling underpinned by anxiety over the fate of the human: spectrality, monstrosity, and apocalypse. Instead of offering hope, the Gothic has been a philosophical meditation on human relations to the nonhuman, raising profound questions about how we can counter anthropocentric thought and strive for a more harmonious existence with the world around us.

Weight: 332g
Dimension: 152 x 229 x 15 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781531503420