Transnational Gothic: Literary and Social Exchanges in the Long Nineteenth Century ed. by Monika Elbert and Bridget M. Marshall (review)

Even though the Gothic is about transgressing and dissolving boundaries, Gothicists have long specialized in nationally and chronologically-bound subsets, such as the Early American Gothic or the British Romantic Gothic, isolating their internal anxieties and influences. Recently, however, scholars have begun to break down these boundaries in favor of a comprehensive, interconnected Gothic tradition. Monika Elbert and Bridget M. Marshall’s collection of essays, Transnational Gothic: Literary and Social Exchanges in the Long Nineteenth Century, makes a significant contribution to this recent conversation.

In their introduction, Elbert and Marshall survey previous scholarship on the Gothic, including the contentious category of American Gothic, in a way useful to junior and advanced scholars alike. Elbert and Marshall argue that, though the United States attempted to create a literary legacy of its own, the American Gothic both influenced and was influenced by other traditions, particularly considering the historical and literary heritage shared with Great Britain. The fourteen essays analyze this complex cross-cultural exchange, and they consider a range of forms, including poetry, drama, short stories, and novels, encompassing well-known as well as rediscovered texts.

The collection is split into four sections. The first, “Old World Gothic and the New World Frontier,” covers the most direct literary exchange between Britain and America. The first essay, Siân Silyn Roberts’s “Transnational Perspective on American Gothic Criticism,” challenges American exceptionalism that sees the American Gothic as a way to manage what Leslie Fiedler calls its “special guilts,” such as slavery. Roberts claims, instead, that the American Gothic relies heavily on the conventions inherited from Britain. Christian Knirsch illustrates this point nicely in the next essay, “Transcultural Gothic: Isaac Mitchell’s Alonzo and Melissa as an Early Example of Popular Culture,” which analyzes Americanized Gothic conventions that draw directly from British sources.

The three essays in the next section challenge the common claim that the Gothic is simply anti-Catholic. Instead, these authors argue that American and British Gothic literature portray Catholicism’s aesthetic, structure, and values as modeling new beliefs as well as new kinds of heroes and villains. Diane Long Hoeveler’s “Demonizing the Catholic Other: Religion and the Secularization Process in Gothic Literature” sees Catholicism within the Gothic as a complex source of nostalgia as well as fear, a haunting fascination in an age of increasing secularization. This section—which adds Nancy F. Sweet’s discussion of convent escape-narratives to Roland Finger’s analysis of captivity narratives in the previous section—makes a nice transition to the third section, “Anglo-American Genre Exchanges: Beyond the Novel,” which examines diverse genres, including biography, drama, poetry, and war narratives.

In describing the almost-identical careers of eighteenth-century actors George Frederick Cooke and Edmund Kean in her essay “The Haunted Transatlantic Libertine: Edmund Kean’s American Tour,” Melissa Wehler aligns Kean’s struggle with audiences (British and American) and with the ghostly presence of his predecessor, Cooke, in the public imagination to the struggles of America and Britain to manage their identities in association with each another. She says, “For Cooke, Britain represented a past to which he could never return and America represented a present from which he could not escape,” describing an ambivalence also found within larger Anglo-American relations (p. 143). Attention to biographical detail as well as theorizing the Gothic celebrity as a haunted being make this an enjoyable and widely applicable essay. Similarly suggestive, Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet’s “Transnational War Gothic from the American Civil War to World War I” tackles the Gothic’s ability to depict war’s most horrific psychological effects. War ghosts seek expression of their battle traumas that leave them uncertain whether they are dead or alive. Boundaries become especially blurred when ghosts do not know they are ghosts, a disorientation similar to that of returned veterans.

The last section addresses oppression...