Gothic Images of Race in Nineteenth-Century England
Author | : Howard L. Malchow |
Publisher | : Stanford University Press |
Total Pages | : 364 |
Release | : 1996 |
ISBN-10 | : 0804726647 |
ISBN-13 | : 9780804726641 |
Rating | : 4/5 (641 Downloads) |
Download or read book Gothic Images of Race in Nineteenth-Century England written by Howard L. Malchow and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 1996 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In pursuing the sources for late-eighteenth and nineteenth-century demonization of racial and cultural difference, this book moves back and forth between the imagined world of literature and the real world of historical experience, between fictional romance and what has been called the parallel fictions of the human sciences of anthropology and biology. The author argues that the gothic genre and its various permutations offered a language that could be appropriated, consciously or not, by racists in a powerful and obsessively reiterated evocation of terror, disgust, and alienation. But he shows that the gothic itself also evolved in the context of the brutal progress of European nationalism and imperialism, and absorbed much from them. This book explores both the gothicization of race and the racialization of the gothic as inseparable processes.