American Women's Regionalist Fiction

American Women’s Regionalist Fiction: Mapping the Gothic seeks to redress the monolithic view of a national American Gothic, instead considering specific regions in the U.S. and how they express their own particular versions of the Gothic. Focusing on American women writers whose views of hauntings are ultimately connected to their image of an internal and ofttimes oppressive domestic landscape, these essays consider the ways the outdoor landscape feeds their fantasy and contributes to their notion of a natural history and local mythology that coincides with their sense of a world beyond the confines of the home. The clash between these two realms often paves the way for the Gothic encounter. Ultimately, these essays reveal the impact of the regional Gothic in considering how collision between the local and the national precipitates a conflict that leads to the Gothic protagonist’s sense of belonging or alienation.

Monika Elbert is Professor of English and a Distinguished University Scholar at Montclair State University, USA. She is editor of the Nathaniel Hawthorne Review and her recent publications include: Hawthorne in Context (2018) and, co-edited with Wendy Ryden, Haunting Realities:  Naturalist Gothic and American Realism (2017).

Rita Bode is Professor of English Literature at Trent University, Canada. Her co-edited collections include L.M. Montgomery and the Matter of Nature(s) (2018), and L.M. Montgomery’s Rainbow Valleys: The Ontario Years, 1911-1942 (2015).