American Women’s Regionalist Fiction: Mapping the Gothic seeks to redress the monolithic vision of American Gothic by analyzing the various sectional or regional attempts to Gothicize what is most claustrophobic or peculiar about local history.

Introduction.- New England Gothic: Resisting Nation.- Nancy Sweet, “Gothic Woods and the Shining City on a Hill: Harriet Prescott Spofford’s ‘Circumstance’”.- Melissa McFarland Pennell, “New England Gothic/New England Guilt: Mary Wilkins Freeman’s Giles Corey and the Salem Witchcraft Episode”.- Cécile Roudeau, “Sarah Orne Jewett’s New England Gothic:  ‘Lady Ferry’ and the Uncanny Durability of Colonial History”.- New England’s Landscapes and the Eco-Gothic.- Rita Bode, “Local Habitations as Gothic Terrain in Rose Terry Cooke”.- Daniel Mrozowski, “Hallowed Ground:  The Gothic New England of Sarah Orne Jewett and Mary Wilkins Freeman”.- Cynthia Murillo, “Life By Landscape: The Sublime and the Spectacle of Transcendence in the Gothic Fiction of Edith Wharton”.- Southern Gothic: Folklore, Superstition, Race.- Alicia Mischa Renfroe ‘That Dim Abode’: Uncanny Region in Rebecca Harding Davis’s “The Tragedy of Fauquier”.- Wendy Ryden, “Gothic Chopin: Negotiating Realism’s Divide in Bayou Folk”.- Ellen Weinauer, “The Gothic and the “Southern Lady”: Catherine Warfield’s The Household of Bouverie”.- Jeffrey Weinstock, “Haunted Homesteads:  E.D.E.N. Southworth’s Dual Gothic”.- Valerie Levy, ““Hoodoo and Voodoo in Zora Neale Hurston’s Gothic Folklore”.- West Coast Gothic.- Lesley Ginsberg, “Mary Austin’s California Gothic”.- Dara Downey, “Emma Frances Dawson’s Urban California Gothic”.-  Laura Laffrado, “’It Will Haunt the Reader after the Others have Faded into the Mists’: The Gothic West of Ella Rhoads Higginson’s ‘In the Bitter Root Mountains’”.- Laura Mielke, “Zitkala Sa’s Defiant Gothicism”.- Midwest Hauntings.- Monika Elbert, “Alice Cary and Margaret Fuller: Mundane Musings and Great Lakes Hauntings”.-  Stéphanie Durrans, “Specters of the Great Plains: Cather’s My Antonia as a Gothic Regionalist Novel”.-  Jane Anne Fleming, “Gothic Spaces and the “Homeland”: Resisting Exceptionalism in Constance FenimoreWoolson’s Tales of the Great Lakes and Reconstruction”.

American Women’s Regionalist Fiction: Mapping the Gothic seeks to redress the monolithic view of a national American Gothic, instead considering specific regions in the U.S. and how they express their own particular versions of the Gothic. Focusing on American women writers whose views of hauntings are ultimately connected to their image of an internal and ofttimes oppressive domestic landscape, these essays consider the ways the outdoor landscape feeds their fantasy and contributes to their notion of a natural history and local mythology that coincides with their sense of a world beyond the confines of the home. The clash between these two realms often paves the way for the Gothic encounter. Ultimately, these essays reveal the impact of the regional Gothic in considering how collision between the local and the national precipitates a conflict that leads to the Gothic protagonist’s sense of belonging or alienation. Monika Elbert is Professor of English and a Distinguished University Scholar at Montclair State University, USA. She is editor of the Nathaniel Hawthorne Review and her recent publications include: Hawthorne in Context (2018) and, co-edited with Wendy Ryden, Haunting Realities:  Naturalist Gothic and American Realism (2017). Rita Bode is Professor of English Literature at Trent University, Canada. Her co-edited collections include L.M. Montgomery and the Matter of Nature(s) (2018), and L.M. Montgomery’s Rainbow Valleys: The Ontario Years, 1911-1942 (2015).

“The individual essays collected in American Women’s Regionalist Fiction: Mapping the Gothic are valuable as perceptive studies of a wide range of women writers, but the book is ultimately more than the sum of its parts. Together, these essays establish the existence of a powerful literary tradition that unites Gothic conventions with a feminist exploration of landscape and place. Monika Elbert and Rita Bode and their contributors provide a compelling argument for the importance of this feminist transformation of Gothic spaces in the United States while recovering and illuminating a number of unjustly neglected texts.” (Alfred Bendixen, Lecturer in English, Princeton University, USA, and Executive Director, American Literature Association) 

Studies American women writers whose views of hauntings connect to their image of an internal domestic landscape Examines how the collision between the local and national can lead to the Gothic protagonist’s sense of belonging or alienation Addresses regions in the US that have their own specific versions of the Gothic including the South, New England, the West Coast, and the Midwest

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