Coastal Gothic, 1719–2020

Haunted shorelines, oppressively expansive beaches, and the crumbling edgelands around coastal cliffs have been a feature of the Gothic literary tradition. This Element examines the function of littoral terror, hauntings, and uncanny encounters as a means of unsettling pervasive conceptions of identity at national, regional, and individual levels.

Littoral zones such as haunted shorelines, oppressively expansive beaches, and the crumbling edgelands around coastal cliffs have been an indelible feature of the Gothic literary tradition since the eighteenth century. They are frequently portrayed as strange, interstitial realms, sites of epistemic and existential precarity, of wreckage and uncanny returns, poised between the homely and unhomely, whose intense openness to the world(s) beyond contend uneasily (yet valuably) with the imagined integrity of selves and nations: it is a region, above all, of unsettlement. Coastal Gothic, 1719–2020 offers the first long-form examination of the coastal Gothic. Focusing on British and Irish Gothic authors and on the fraught political and human histories of the coastline, this Element examines the function of littoral terror, hauntings, and uncanny encounters as a means of unsettling pervasive conceptions of identity at national, regional, and individual levels.