Alien Nation: Nineteenth-Century Gothic Fictions and English Nationality

by Cannon Schmitt

Overview

Rife with sexuality, chaos, confusion, and terror, the Gothic has seemed to many of its recent readers to be a subversive genre, resisting enforced gender constructions or straitened notions of rationality, disinterring that which has been forbidden or repressed. In Alien Nation Cannon Schmitt moves away from these models of the genre to chart, instead, the ways in which Gothic fictions and conventions gave shape to a sense of English nationality during the century in which British imperial power was stretching out its greatest reach.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780812233513
Publisher:	University of Pennsylvania Press, Inc.
Publication date:	03/29/1997
Series:	Anniversary Collection
Pages:	232
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 1.00(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Cannon Schmitt is Professor of English at the University of Toronto.

Editorial Reviews

"Schmitt's account of the political function and fate of the Gothic during the course of a century is both topical and engaging. His thesis that the Gothic participated in the construction of an English national identity has the potential not just to enrich more familiar versions of the Gothic but to compel that discourse into relation with current studies of 'nation and narration' in postcolonial literature."

Connecticut College Janet Gezari

"Schmitt's account of the political function and fate of the Gothic during the course of a century is both topical and engaging. His thesis that the Gothic participated in the construction of an English national identity has the potential not just to enrich more familiar versions of the Gothic but to compel that discourse into relation with current studies of 'nation and narration' in postcolonial literature."—Janet Gezari, Connecticut College

From the Publisher

Challenging the accepted view of Gothic literature as subversive, shows how the conventions of the genre gave shape to a sense of English nationality during the century when British imperial power was attaining its greatest reach. Examines the work of Ann Radcliffe, De Quincey, Charlotte Bront<:e>, Matthew Arnold, Wilkie Collins, and Bram Stoker. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.

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