The Cambridge Companion to World-Gothic Literature

Before gothic villains stalked industrialising Britain, spectres were haunting British plantations in the 'New World'. Linking these monsters, this Companion upends gothic's Eurocentric origin story, revealing world-gothic as a cultural archive of modernity's socio-ecological violence, from the era of enslavement to the present planetary emergency.

Monsters have always swarmed around the frontiers of colonialism and capitalism, from Europe's invasion and occupation of the Americas to the planetary emergency of the present day. In this volume, we discover how the early British Gothic – far from a progenitor – is in fact a belated cultural response to capitalist modernity, one anticipated by myriad spectres haunting the plantations of the 'New World'. Gothic did not begin in Britain, and then become global over time. Rather, as the volume reveals, gothic has always been world-gothic: a way of dealing with the alienation and anxiety that erupt with capitalist modernisation, when- and wherever this is taking place. Essays in the volume chart the new links and comparisons enabled by this insight, renovating established gothic concepts and outlining groundbreaking new theoretical infrastructure. Together, chapters provincialise the 'western' gothic tradition, in order to open up new possibilities for world-gothic reading.