The goal of this special issue is twofold: to bring together Gothic works–British, Irish and Italian–that are typically not approached from a transnational perspective, and to consider their engagement with environment-and species-related issues through the theoretical lens of an emerging field of critical inquiry–the EcoGothic. Such goals share an interesting, critical connection, as British and Italian scholars of Environmental, Animal, and Posthuman Studies, along with their American and Canadian counterparts, have figured prominently in laying the theoretical and philosophical foundation for EcoGothic inquiry. 1 An exploration of the Italian Gothic alongside the more recognized British and Irish traditions is, in itself, particularly warranted since the genre, despite its rich tradition, has been largely neglected–moored to Italian shores and excluded from comparative and critical discussions of the European Gothic. 2 An EcoGothic approach poses a challenge to a familiar Gothic subject–nature–taking a nonanthropocentric position to reconsider the role that the environment, species, and nonhumans play in the construction of monstrosity and fear. Ecofeminism has played a key role in shaping such a perspective, providing a theoretical base that, by exposing interlocking androcentric and anthropocentric hierarchies, misogyny and speciesism, seeks to question the mutual oppression of women, animals, and nature. In short, the EcoGothic examines the construction of the Gothic body–unhuman, nonhuman, transhuman, posthuman, or hybrid–through a more inclusive lens, asking how it can be more meaningfully understood as a site of articulation for environmental and species identity. In contemporary society, the EcoGothic serves to give voice to ingrained biases and a mounting ecophobia–fears stemming from humans’ precarious relationship with all that is nonhuman. While such fears are not new, their expression today in increasingly apocalyptic terms can be traced directly to nineteenth-century, industrialised society’s uneasy reaction to Malthusian ‘doomsday’prophesies about population, the food supply, and agriculture and the vehement reaffirmation of human primacy over nature and animals. 3 Industrialisation may be seen as