Women's ghost literature in nineteenth-century Britain / Melissa Edmundson Makala.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Edmundson, Melissa.

Series:

Gothic literary studies

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Women and literature--Great Britain.

Women and literature.

Gothic fiction (Literary genre), English--History and criticism.

Gothic fiction (Literary genre), English.

Gothic literature--History and criticism.

Gothic literature.

Great Britain.

Physical Description:

x, 241 pages ; 23 cm.

Place of Publication:

Cardiff : University of Wales Press, 2013.

Summary:

Nineteenth-century ghost literature by women shows the Gothic becoming more experimental and subversive as its writers abandoned the stereotypical Gothic heroines of the past in order to create more realistic, middle-class characters (both living and dead, male and female) who rage against the limits imposed on them by the natural world. The ghosts of Female Gothic thereby become reflections of the social, sexual, economic and racial troubles of the living. Expanding the parameters of Female Gothic and moving it into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries allows us to recognise women's ghost literature as a specific strain of the Female Gothic that began not with Ann Radcliffe, but with the Romantic Gothic ballads of women in the first decade of the nineteenth century. Book jacket.

Contents:

1 Female Revenants and the Beginnings of Women's Ghost Literature 22

2 Ghostly Lovers and Transgressive Supernatural Sexualities 48

3 'Uncomfortable Houses' and the Spectres of Capital 91

4 Haunted Empire: Spectral Uprisings as Imperialist Critique 132.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

0708325645

9780708325643

OCLC:

809911123