American Gothic Culture

Abstract

This Companion surveys the traditions and conventions of the dark side of American culture - its repressed memories, its anxieties and panics, its fears and horrors, its obsessions and paranoias. Featuring new critical essays by established and emerging academics from a range of national backgrounds, this collection offers new discussions and analyses of canonical and lesser-known literary and other works. Its scope ranges from the earliest manifestations of American Gothic traditions in frontier narratives and colonial myths, to its recent responses to contemporary global events. Moving from analyses of eighteenth-century literature to twenty-first century video games, and touching upon visual art, film, and television, serial killers, monsters, education and cityscapes, this Companion aims to demonstrate the centrality of the gothic to American culture writ large through four key sections: Gothic Histories, Gothic Identities; Gothic Genres, Gothic Sites; Gothic Media; and American Creatures.

To Write Like a Dream: Nineteenth-Century Legacies

“…21 Joel Faflak elaborates on Coleridge's disagreement with the associationism of eighteenth-century empiricism, particularly the lack of agency advocated by the work of the philosopher David Hartley, which reduced "mental events to a physiology of sense perception." 22 Strongly influenced by mesmerism's "ambiguous and tenacious suture between psyche and soma," 23 Coleridge's theory of the two levels of imagination both valorized imaginative autonomy ("the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM") and a secondary act of conscious will that "dissolves, diffuses dissipates" in order to "re-create." 24 The question of (authorial) agency, however, is fraught in Coleridge's interpretation of dreams and, more often than not, the dreamer in his writings is seen to be afflicted by a "fiendish crowd/of shapes and thoughts" ("Pains of Sleep").…”