Gothic passages: racial ambiguity and the American gothic

Abstract

This study analyzes the development of American gothic literature alongside 19th-century discourses of passing and racial ambiguity. By bringing together these areas of analysis, Justin Edwards considers the following questions: how are the categories of and the rhetoric of racial difference tied to the language of gothicism?; what can these discursive ties tell us about a range of social boundaries - gender, sexuality, class, race - during the 19th century?; and what can the construction and destabilization of these social boundaries tell us about the development of the US gothic? The sources used to address these questions are diverse, often literary and historical, fluidly moving between representation and reality. Works of gothic literature by Edgar Allen Poe, Herman Melville, Frances Harper and Charles Chesnutt, among, others, are placed in the contexts of 19th-century writers gothicized biracial and passing figures in order to frame them within the rubric of a demonization of difference. By charting such depictions in literature and popular science, he focuses on an obsession in antebellum and postbellum America over the threat of collapsing racial identities - threats that resonated strongly with fears of the transgression of the boundaries of sexuality and the social anxiety concerning the instabilites of gender, class, ethnicity and nationality. This volume not only builds upon the work of Americanists who uncover an underlying racial element in US gothic literature but also sheds light on the pervasiveness of gothic discourse in 19th-century representations of passing from both sides of the colour line.

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