Dark Scenes from Damaged Earth

Justin D. Edwards is professor of English and chair in Gothic studies at the University of Stirling. He is author of, most recently, Tropical Gothic in Literature and Culture: The Americas and coeditor of B-Movie Gothic: International Perspectives.Rune Graulund is associate professor in American literature and culture at the Center for American Studies and director of the research cluster Anthropocene Aesthetics at the University of Southern Denmark. He is coauthor of Grotesque and Mobility at Large: Globalization, Textuality, and Innovative Travel Writing.Johan HÖglund is professor of English at Linnaeus University. He is coeditor of B-Movie Gothic: International Perspectives and Nordic Gothic.

• ContentsAcknowledgmentsIntroduction: Gothic in the AnthropocenePart I. Anthropocene1. The AnthropoceneJeffrey Andrew Weinstock2. De-extinction: A Gothic Masternarrative for the AnthropoceneMichael Fuchs3. Lovecraft vs. VanderMeer: Posthuman Horror (and Hope?) in the Zone of ExceptionRune Graulund4. Monstrous Megalodons of the Anthropocene: Extinction and Adaptation in Prehistoric Shark Fiction, 1974–2018Jennifer Schell5. A Violence “Just below the Skin”: Atmospheric Terror and Racial Ecologies from the African AnthropoceneEsthie HugoPart II. Plantationocene6. Horrors of the Horticultural: Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland and the Landscapes of the AnthropoceneLisa M. Vetere7. True Detective’s Folk GothicDawn Keetley8. Beyond the Slaughterhouse: Anthropocene, Animals, and GothicJustin D. EdwardsPart III. Capitalocene9. Gothic in the Capitalocene: World-Ecological Crisis, Decolonial Horror, and the South African PostcolonyRebecca Duncan10. Overpopulation: The Human as InhumanTimothy Clark11. Digging Up Dirt: Reading the Anthropocene through German RomanticismBarry Murnane12. Got a Light? The Dark Currents of Energy in Twin Peaks: The ReturnTimothy Morton and Rune GraulundPart IV. Chthulucene13. The Anthropocene Within: Love and Extinction in M. R. Carey’s The Girl with All the Gifts and The Boy on the BridgeJohan HÖglund14. Rot and Recycle: Gothic Eco-burialLaura R. Kremmel15. Erotics and Annihilation: CaitlÍn R. Kiernan, Queering the Weird, and Challenges to the “Anthropocene”Sara Wasson16. MonstroceneFred BottingContributorsIndex

"All of the essays connect the subjective potency of the texts under discussion - the affects and moods that they inspire in the reader or viewer - to the ways that such works also give us a deeper understanding of the ongoing ecological transactions that are putting our very existence at risk. Dark Scenes from Damaged Earth both reclaims the gothic as an urgently relevant mode of fiction-making and suggests that aesthetic approaches are able to bring us a kind of understanding that scientific studies on their own could not."-Los Angeles Review of Books"It is impossible for me to do complete justice to this book in a review, but I will say that the sixteen essays included in it are all illuminating, thoughtful, and interesting."-Gothic Wanderer