Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book seeks to expand other limited definitions of the Gothic by focusing on international issues: religious traditions, social reform, economic and financial pitfalls, manifest destiny and expansion, changing concepts of nationhood, and destabilizing moments of empire-building. It explores these transatlantic, and indeed, transnational horizons, and the resonances they create in the study of the Gothic. In recent decades, Gothic criticism has followed the trends of criticism in general. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s early work, The Coherence of Gothic Conventions, though grounded in psychology and in ‘traditional’ new criticism, branches out into gender studies, with, for example, her weaving together of the ‘male paranoid plot’ with ‘the maternal or monstrous plot’. There are a host of Gothic gender explorations, but they usually have a singular purpose to analyze male or female experience within either an Anglo or American culture.