#ecogothic

[devoutjunk]

If you're interested in following my writing or have enjoyed the little snippets I've posted on here from my novel, you can read a longer excerpt in my subscriber newsletter this month here (plus the usual books recs, link round-up etc.).

[thegirlwiththelantern]

[thesleepingstag]

ɪɴ ᴛʜᴇ ꜱᴏꜰᴛ ʟɪɢʜᴛ ᴏꜰ ᴅᴀᴡɴ, ᴀ ʙᴇᴀꜱᴛ ɪꜱ ᴀᴡᴀᴋᴇɴᴇᴅ

Lil beasties seen in Theodore Roosevelt Natl Park, part two

𓃓

[shestoodintears]

Maybe you will share in my excitement : I've been reading this since I discovered it yesterday! It explores the Capitalocene, the Plantationocene, and the Chthulucene, it talks about the Anthropocene as a geohistorical event as well as a literary object and how we use the gothic to talk about the gothic times we live in now.

The chapter on de-extinction written by Michael Fuchs is amazing, very exciting, can't wait to use this in my own work!!

This fantastic work on the ecogothic is in Open Access! Click here.

[weirdletter]

The Forest and the EcoGothic: The Deep Dark Woods in the Popular Imagination (Palgrave Gothic), by Elizabeth Parker, Palgrave Macmillan, 2020. Cover image by Chin Heng Tcoh / EycEm, info: palgrave.com.

This book offers the first full length study on the pervasive archetype of The Gothic Forest in Western culture. The idea of the forest as deep, dark, and dangerous has an extensive history and continues to resonate throughout contemporary popular culture. The Forest and the EcoGothic examines both why we fear the forest and how exactly these fears manifest in our stories. It draws on and furthers the nascent field of the ecoGothic, which seeks to explore the intersections between ecocriticism and Gothic studies. In the age of the Anthropocene, this work importantly interrogates our relationship to and understandings of the more-than-human world. This work introduces the trope of the Gothic forest, as well as important critical contexts for its discussion, and examines the three main ways in which this trope manifests: as a living, animated threat; as a traditional habitat for monsters; and as a dangerous site for human settlement. This book will appeal to students and scholars with interests in horror and the Gothic, ecohorror and the ecoGothic, environmentalism, ecocriticism, and popular culture more broadly. The accessibility of the subject of ‘The Deep Dark Woods’, coupled with increasingly mainstream interests in interactions between humanity and nature, means this work will also be of keen interest to the general public.

Contents: 1. Introduction: Into the Woods 2. Theorising the Forest: Approaching a Dark Ecology 3. ‘What If It’s the Trees?’: The Living Forest 4. Where the Wild Things Are: Monsters in the Forest 5. ‘It Isn’t Right to Build so Close to the Woods’: Humans and the Forest 6. Conclusion: What Is ‘That Awful Secret of the Wood?’ Bibliography Index

[screenshottery]

In the wild

Women in the landscape in Butter on the Latch (2013, Josephine Decker, dir.)

[eofotmc]

Post-apocalyptic religion in fiction.

A common trope in the post-apocalyptic genre is that aspects of liberal capitalism get enshrined as religions. There’s a sect of people who worship the Almighty Dollar, use malls as temples, and believe that the cataclysm happened because people didn’t perform the ritual of shopping enough. 

This is often meant to be a satire of the way things are. Taking capitalist culture to its logical conclusion, a less subtle idolization of Capital. It often comes off more as just another form of capitalist realism, as Fisher would say. Imagining the end of the world before the end of consumerism. 

The things that are cherished today wouldn’t necessarily be cherished in the aftermath. Even in the darkness following the superpowers of the Bronze Age people didn’t enshrine their unsustainable bureaucracy and proto-globalization. They enshrined the warrior spirit that made those powers dominant. 

The very same spirit which created the comfort that eventually made them vulnerable to decay. The same spirit which was held in some form by the Sea people who struck the final blow. Consumerism as well as liberalism and capitalism altogether would be held in even greater disdain among their ruins. 

[1000daysof]

ecogoth

-j.edmund