The Cambridge Companion to American Gothic ed. by Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock (review)

Contemporary American culture is so permeated with gothic elements that to a modern audience the gothic seems a usual, even predictable, element in books, games, television, and movies. In the introduction to The Cambridge Companion to American Gothic, Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock reminds us that this evolution is more surprising than current circumstance might suggest. "What correspondences," he asks, "could a literary form emphasizing medieval history, ghosts in crumbling castles, emotional extremes, and a debased aristocracy possibly have in the late eighteen and nineteenth century with a new country lacking an entrenched class structure and founded on the principles of Enlightenment rationalism, and why does it retain its hold over the American imagination today?" (1).

Weinstock delineates how American literature and popular culture draw from the international gothic and recreate those gothic elements in a new imaginative landscape. Framing this discussion, he references Leslie Fiedler's Love and Death in the American Novel (1960) to assert that American literature owes its origins and tradition to the gothic. Weinstock's edited collection advances and updates Fiedler's vision with an inclusive range of authors and cultural artifacts. To open this conversation, Weinstein's introduction traces definitions of the gothic as a medium that grapples with questions of transgression and power. He discusses how these preoccupations manifest in an "American Gothic tradition [that] arguably clusters around four interconnected primary loci, each with its particular boundaries: religion, geography, racial and sexual otherness, and rationality" (6).

Weinstock, a prolific scholar and associate editor of the Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, includes major voices in this collection. Alfred Bendixen, for instance, is founder of the American Literature Association and an influential scholar whose work includes Edith Wharton: New Critical Essays (1992; 2016). In "Romanticism and the American Gothic," Bendixen illustrates the early impact of the gothic on American writers. The gothic offers writers "a flexible and adaptable mode capable of asking a wide range of challenging questions about life in a fluid democratic society in which identity could be lost or destroyed as well as created and enabling them to establish a set of conventions that would form the foundation of our fiction" (41). Another major voice, Charles L. Crow, author of American Gothic (2009) and A Companion to American Gothic (2014), contributes a chapter titled "Southern American Gothic." To name just one more, John Paul Riquelme, editor of Gothic & Modernism: Essaying Dark Literary Modernity (2008), adds "Modernist American Gothic," highlighting the twentieth-century's history of violence and "dissolving of hierarchical boundaries" that destabilized realism's tendencies toward "determinate closure," "domestic order," and "stylistic conventions" (69).

The book's sixteen chapters are arranged into a tripartite structure. Part one focuses on literary periods including early gothic, romanticism, realism and naturalism, modernism, and contemporary. Part two offers essays on identities (race, gender, orientation) and locations (frontier, southern, and urban). The chapters in part three analyze genre and media, specifically covering children's literature, American poetry, drama, film and TV, and gaming. This mix of periods and topics provides flexibility for scholars, teachers, and students searching for a particular entry into the gothic, whether via video games or romanticism. Further, this mixed approach reminds readers of the flexibility and reach of the gothic. As a whole, the collection contends with the gothic genre "in two ways: first, by taking issue with the premise that America ever was a place free from history, class relations, and, one might add, other forms of social antagonism including race, gender, religion; and second, by showing the ways in which the Gothic goes beyond elaborating and redeploying a specific set of identifiable clichés (ghosts, castles, monsters, so forth) as it gives shape to culturally specific anxiety and tabooed desires" (2).

Many of the chapters position the gothic within the historical moment, even from the earliest European arrivals. In her chapter "Early American Gothic (Puritan and New Republic)," Faye Ringle points out that "the United States of America was...