The Gothic Canadian Century

Kerstin Knopf

The Gothic Canadian Century. Unhomely Beginnings and Canada's Gothic Literature in English 1800-1900

ISBN 978-3-98940-054-2, 312 S., kt., € 39,50 (2024)

This book provides a comprehensive account of Canadian gothic literature throughout the nineteenth century, including little-known texts that were popular in their day but have since sunk into oblivion. Based on various American Gothic subgenres discussed in detail, it establishes the Frontier Gothic, French-Canadian Gothic, Exploration Gothic, Orientalist Gothic, and Female Gothic as major Canadian gothic subgenres. The book theorizes Canada’s unhomely beginnings and traces the responding development of Canadian gothic literature, while relating textual analyses to the British and American gothic traditions. The book discusses the Canadian texts' responses to land, historical trauma, frontier experience, nation-building, colonial ideologies of conquest, rifts between Old and New World values, as well as anxieties about French and British neglect and American domination, national identity, and fears of the national and cultural 'other.' Women's texts responded vigorously to conventional gender beliefs, marriage laws, and patriarchal domination of women, while employing the gothic mode to imagine rebellious and gender-bending behavior and more egalitarian or unfettered lives for women. The book also teases out the gaps in terms of coloniality and enslavement and shines a light on the ghosts of the dispossessed Natives and enslaved Africans wherever they dared to appear.

Buchvorschau / Inhaltsverzeichnis (pdf)

Pressestimme

"Knopf's study will serve the interests of various readers. It is useful for its summaries of key developments of both the U.S.-American and Canadian Gothic. It provides precious insights into the Canadian inflections of gothic subgenres, with helpful short summaries of novels that may not be all too familiar to readers. It charts the field extremely well in the case of the Female Gothic, with commendable research summaries of existing studies and approaches. Given the attention it pays to the female Gothic in Canada and writers such Ellen Kyle Vavasour Noel, May Agnes Fleming, and Louisa Annie Murray, it carves out important space for these neglected voices and will be helpful to anyone seeking an overview of the beginnings of the Female Gothic in Canadian literature."

Julia Straub, Amerikastudien / American Studies 70.4 (2025)