This Companion offers a thorough overview of the diversity of the American Gothic tradition from its origins to the present.

This Companion explores the Gothic across literature, film, television, and cyberspace, revealing how it has proliferated since 1900 as an expression of modernity. Essays examine the role of Gothic in major struggles of modern life over sex and gender, the intermixing of different cultures, and the very nature of modernity.

Gothic as a form of fiction-making has played a major role in Western culture since the late eighteenth century. Here fourteen world-class experts on the Gothic provide thorough and revealing accounts of this haunting-to-horrifying type of fiction from the 1760s (the decade of The Castle of Otranto, the first so-called Gothic story ) to the end of the twentieth century (an era haunted by filmed and computerized Gothic simulations). Along the way, these essays explore the connections of Gothic fictions to political and industrial revolutions, the realistic novel, the theatre, Romantic and post-Romantic poetry, nationalism and racism from Europe to America, colonized and post-colonial populations, the rise of film and other visual technologies, the struggles between high and popular culture, changing psychological attitudes towards human identity, gender and sexuality, and the obscure lines between life and death, sanity and madness. The volume also includes a chronology and guides to further reading.

The Cambridge Companion to American Gothic offers an accessible overview to both the breadth and depth of the American Gothic tradition. This subgenre features works from many of America's best-known authors: Edgar Allan Poe, Toni Morrison, Stephen King, Anne Rice, Henry James, Edith Wharton, William Faulkner, and Flannery O'Connor. Authored by leading experts in the field, the introduction and sixteen chapters explore the American Gothic chronologically, in relation to different social groups, in connection with different geographic regions, and in different media, including children's literature, poetry, drama, film, television, and gaming. This Companion provides a rich and thorough analysis of the American Gothic tradition from a twenty-first-century standpoint, and will be a key resource undergraduates, graduate students, and professional researchers interested in this topic.

Surveying the relationship between American politics and the twentieth-century novel, this volume analyzes how political movements, ideas, and events shaped the American novel. It also shows how those political phenomena were shaped in turn by long-form prose fiction.

Opening up the warm body of American Horror – through literature, film, TV, music, video games, and a host of other mediums – this book gathers the leading scholars in the field to dissect the gruesome histories and shocking forms of American life. Through a series of accessible and informed essays, moving from the seventeenth century to the present day, The Cambridge Companion to American Horror explores one of the liveliest and most progressive areas of contemporary culture. From slavery to censorship, from occult forces to monstrous beings, this book is essential reading for anyone interested in America's most terrifying cultural expressions.