Gothic Things: Dark Enchantment and Anthropocene Anxiety

About the Book

Offering an innovative approach to the Gothic, Gothic Things: Dark Enchantment and Anthropocene Anxiety breaks ground with a new materialist analysis of the genre, highlighting the ways that, since its origins in the eighteenth century, the Gothic has been intensely focused on "ominous matter" and "thing power." In chapters attending to gothic bodies, spaces, books, and other objects, Gothic Things argues that the Gothic has always been about what happens when objects assume mysterious animacy or potency and when human beings are reduced to the status of just one thing among many-more powerful-others.
In exploring how the Gothic insistently decenters the human, Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock reveals human beings to be enmeshed in networks of human and nonhuman forces mostly outside of their control. Gothic Things thus resituates the Gothic as the uncanny doppelganger of twenty-first-century critical and cultural theory, lurking just beneath the surface (and sometimes explicitly surfacing) as it haunts considerations of how human beings interact with objects and their environment. In these pages the Gothic offers a dark reflection of the contemporary "nonhuman turn," expressing a twenty-first-century structure of feeling undergirded by anxiety over the fate of the human: spectrality, monstrosity, and apocalypse.
Substituting horror for hope, the Gothic, Weinstock explains, has been a philosophical meditation on human relations to the nonhuman since its inception, raising significant questions about how we can counter anthropocentric thought in our quest to live more harmoniously with the world around us.

Table of Contents:

Preface: Three Beginnings vii
Introduction: Ominous Matter 1
1 Gothic Thing Theory 19
2 Dark Enchantment and Gothic Materialism 41
3 Body-as-Thing 72
4 Thing-as- Body 91
5 Book: How to Do Things with Words 115
6 Building: Bigger on the Inside 137
Epilogue: The Ominous Matter of One's Ordinary Life 171
Acknowledgments 173
Notes 175
Works Cited 181
Index 195

About the Author :
Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock is Professor of English at Central Michigan University and associate editor in charge of horror for the Los Angeles Review of Books. His most recent books include Giving the Devil His Due: Satan and Cinema (with Regina Hansen, Fordham, 2021), The Monster Theory Reader (University of Minnesota Press, 2020), and The Cambridge Companion to the American Gothic (Cambridge University Press, 2018). Visit him at JeffreyAndrewWeinstock.com.

Review :
This is a vital and exuberant work, theoretically informed, clear, and hugely engaging. Weinstock grapples with the ways some strands of gothic play out in contemporary environmental theory. In addition, he poses important challenges to that theory, and throughout the book demonstrates commitment to ethics, justice and intellectual rigour. As one panelist says, 'asks big conceptual questions about the purpose and meaning of Gothic and the cultural work it does'.---Sara Wasson, Chair of the International Gothic Association's Allan Lloyd Smith Prize I recommend Weinstock's Gothic Things as an innovative work that explains the links between the Gothic tropes and new theories, allowing Gothic scholars to reframe arguments in a contemporaneous manner, and provides principal authors for each theory along with reviews of fictional books and movies that create an extensive to be-read/watched list for researchers.---Naomi von Senff, MONSTRUM Journal By fully engaging with theories of new materialism and applying them to numerous gothic 'things' - cursed objects, moving photographs, possessed dolls, corpses, found manuscripts, things that are alive that should not be, and things that simply should not be-Weinstock offers a complex and nuanced reading of the gothic and its importance in both theory and culture.---Kevin J. Wetmore, Jr., Ph.D., editor of Theatre and the Macabre and four time Bram Stoker Award nominee