Element contents
Series: Elements in the Gothic
Democracy and the American Gothic
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 June 2024
Summary
While the political undercurrent of the American Gothic has been firmly established, few scholars have surveyed the genre's ambivalent relationship to democracy. The American Gothic routinely undercuts centralised authority by exposing the dark underbelly of the status quo; at the same time, the American Gothic tends to reflect a widespread mistrust of the masses. American readers are too afraid of democracy – and not yet fearful enough. This concise Element theorises the democratic and anti-democratic elements of the American Gothic by surveying the conflicted imaginaries of the genre's mainstays, including Charles Brockden Brown, Edgar Allan Poe, Shirley Jackson, and Stephen King.
- Type
- Element
- Information
- Series: Elements in the GothicOnline ISBN: 9781009279932Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication: 03 October 2024
References
Adams, J., ‘Discourses on Davila’, in Diggins, John Patrick (ed.), The Portable John Adams (New York: Penguin, 2004), pp. 337–395.Google Scholar
Allen, D., Talking to Strangers: Anxieties of Citizenship Since Brown v. Board of Education (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2004).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Baldwin, J., ‘History as Nightmare’, in Morrison, Toni (ed.), James Baldwin: Collected Essays (New York: Library of America, 1998), pp. 579–582.Google Scholar
Balibar, E., Equaliberty: Political Essays, trans. James Ingram (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014).Google Scholar
Barnard, P. and Shapiro, S., ‘Un-Noveling Brown: Liberalism and Its Literary Discontents’, Early American Literature, vol. 57, no. 2 (2022), 549–554.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Beltran, C., Cruelty as Citizenship: How Migrant Suffering Sustains White Democracy (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2020).Google Scholar
Berthold, D., ‘Democracy and Its Discontents’, in Kelley, Wyn (ed.), A Companion to Herman Melville (London: Blackwell, 2006), pp. 149–164.Google Scholar
Bloom, H., ‘Introduction’, in Bloom, Harold (ed.), Modern Critical Views: Edgar Allan Poe (New York: Chelsea House, 1985), pp. 1–14.Google Scholar
Britt, T., ‘Common Property of the Mob: Democracy and Identity in Poe’s “William Wilson”’. The Mississippi Quarterly, vol. 47, no. 2 (Spring 1995), 197–210.Google Scholar
Bryan, F., Real Democracy: New England Town Meeting and How It Works, 2nd ed., (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2003).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Burstein, A., Sentimental Democracy: The Evolution of America’s Romantic Self-Image (New York: Hill and Wang, 2000).Google Scholar
Butler, J., The Psychic Life of Power: Theories of Subjection (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Canby, H., Classic Americans: A Study of Eminent American Writers from Irving to Whitman (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1931).Google Scholar
Canetti, E., Crowds and Power, trans. Carol Stewart (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1984).Google Scholar
Copjec, J., Read My Desire: Lacan against the Historicists (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994).Google Scholar
Cotlar, S., Tom Paine’s America: The Rise and Fall of Transatlantic Radicalism in the Early Republic (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2014).Google Scholar
Crick, B., Democracy: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Derrida, J., Rogues: Two Essays on Reason, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Naas, Michael (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005).Google Scholar
Dillingham, W., Melville’s Short Fiction, 1853–1856 (Athens, GA: University of Georgia, 2008).Google Scholar
Downes, P., ‘Democratic Terror in “My Kinsman Major Molineux” and “The Man of the Crowd”’, Poe Studies/Dark Romanticism, vol. 27 (2004), 31–35.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Downey, D. and Jones, D., ‘King of the Castle: Shirley Jackson and Stephen King’, in Murphy, Bernice M. (ed.), Shirley Jackson: Essays on the Literary Legacy (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2005), pp. 214–236.Google Scholar
DuFord, R., Solidarity in Conflict: A Democratic Theory (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2022).Google Scholar
Elbert, M. M., ‘“The Man of the Crowd” and the Man Outside the Crowd: Poe’s Narrator and the Democratic Reader’, Modern Language Studies, vol. 21, no. 4 (1991), 16–30.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Emerson, D.B., ‘George Lippard’s The Quaker City: Disjointed Text, Dismembered Bodies, Regenerated Democracy’, Nineteenth-Century Literature, vol. 70, no. 1 (2015), 102–131.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Emerson, R.W., ‘Circles’, in Porte, Joel (ed.), Emerson: Essays and Lectures (New York: Library of America, 1983a), pp. 401–415.Google Scholar
Emerson, R.W., ‘The Conduct of Life’, in Porte, Joel (ed.), Emerson: Essays and Lectures (New York: Library of America, 1983b), pp. 937–1125.Google Scholar
Emerson, R.W., ‘The American Scholar’, in Atkinson, Brooks (ed.), The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson (New York: Modern Library, 2000), pp. 43–63.Google Scholar
Faherty, D., ‘“A Certain Unity of Design”: Edgar Allan Poe’s “Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque” and the Terrors of Jacksonian Democracy’, Edgar Allan Poe Review, vol. 6, no. 2 (Fall 2005), 4–21.Google Scholar
Feller, D., The Jacksonian Promise: America, 1815–1840 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Field, J., Town Hall Meetings and the Death of Deliberation: Revised Edition (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2022).Google Scholar
Formisano, R., For the People: American Populist Movements (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2008).Google Scholar
Furet, F., Revolutionary France: 1770–1880, trans. Antonio Nevill (New York: Wiley-Blackwell, 1995).Google Scholar
Galluzzo, A., ‘Wieland and the Aesthetics of Terror: Revolution, Reaction, and the Radical Enlightenment in Early American Letters’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, vol. 42, no. 2 (2009), 255–271.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gauchet, M., ‘Tocqueville, America, and Us: On the Genesis of Democratic Societies’, The Tocqueville Review, vol. 37, no. 2 (2016), 172–224.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gauchet, M., Robespierre: The Man Who Divides Us Most, trans. Malcolm DeBevoise (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2022).Google Scholar
Godwin, W., An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Grenby, M.O., The Anti-Jacobin Novel: British Conservatism and the French Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).Google Scholar
Hardt, M., Michael Hardt Presents Thomas Jefferson: The Declaration of Independence (London: Verso, 2019).Google Scholar
Hawthorne, N., ‘Alice Doane’s Appeal’, in Lathrop, Rose Hawthorne (ed.), The Complete Tales of Nathaniel Hawthorne (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1883), pp. 279–299.Google Scholar
Hawthorne, N., ‘My Kinsman, Major Molineux’, in McIntosh, James (ed.), Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Tales (New York: W.W. Norton, 1987a), pp. 3–17.Google Scholar
Hawthorne, N., ‘Young Goodman Brown’, in McIntosh, James (ed.), Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Tales (New York: W.W. Norton, 1987b), pp. 65–75.Google Scholar
Hawthorne, N., The Selected Letters of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Myerson, Joel (ed.), (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2002).Google Scholar
Hogle, J., ‘Introduction: The Gothic in Western Culture’, in Hogle, Jerrold (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 1–21.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Honig, B., Democracy and the Foreigner (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hooker, J., Black Grief, White Grievance: The Politics of Loss (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2023).Google Scholar
Irving, W., ‘The Adventure of the German Student’, in Neiders, Charles (ed.), The Complete Tales of Washington Irving (New York: De Capo Press, 1998), pp. 223–228.Google Scholar
Jackson, H., American Radicals: How Nineteenth-Century Protest Shaped the Nation (New York: Crown, 2019).Google Scholar
Jackson, S., ‘The Lottery’, in The Lottery and Other Stories (New York: Quality Paperback Book Club, 1991a), pp. 291–306.Google Scholar
Jackson, S., We Have Always Lived in the Castle, in The Lottery and Other Stories (New York: Quality Paperback Book Club, 1991b), pp. 1–214.Google Scholar
Jackson, S., ‘The Summer People’, in Oates, Joyce Carol (ed.), Shirley Jackson: Novels and Stories (New York: Library of America, 2010), pp. 594–607.Google Scholar
Jackson, S., ‘About the End of the World’, in Hyman, Laurence (ed.), Let Me Tell You: New Stories, Essays, and Other Writings (New York: Random House, 2016), pp. 373–375.Google Scholar
Jackson, S., The Letters of Shirley Jackson, Murphy, Bernice M. (ed.), (New York: Random House, 2022).Google Scholar
Kafer, P., Charles Brockden Brown’s Revolution and the Birth of the American Gothic (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004).Google Scholar
King, S., ‘Children of the Corn’, in Night Shift (New York: Anchor, 2011), pp. 390–434.Google Scholar
Larson, K., Imagining Inequality in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).Google Scholar
Lefort, C., Democracy and Political Theory, trans. David Macey (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1988).Google Scholar
Linebaugh, P. and Rediker, M., The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic, 2nd ed., (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2013).Google Scholar
Lippard, G., ‘Thomas Paine: Author-Soldier of the American Revolution — Reprinted’ (Philadelphia, PA: City Institute, 1894).Google Scholar
Lippard, G., The Quaker City; or, the Monks of Monk Hall (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995).Google Scholar
Lloyd-Smith, A., American Gothic Fiction: An Introduction (New York: Continuum, 2004).Google Scholar
Lovecraft, H.P., ‘The Horror at Red Hook’, in Straub, Peter (ed.), H.P. Lovecraft: Tales (New York: Library of America, 2005a), pp. 125–147.Google Scholar
Lovecraft, H.P., Letters to Reinhart Kleine, Joshi, S. T. and Schultz, David (eds.) (New York: Hippocampus Press, 2005b).Google Scholar
Lovecraft, H.P., ‘The Rats in the Walls’, in Straub, Peter (ed.), H.P. Lovecraft: Tales (New York: Library of America, 2005c), pp. 77–97.Google Scholar
Lovecraft, H.P., ‘The Festival’, in Link, Eric (ed.), The Complete Tales of H.P. Lovecraft (New York: Quarto, 2019a), pp. 281–288.Google Scholar
Lovecraft, H.P., ‘The Street’, in Link, Eric (ed.), The Complete Tales of H.P. Lovecraft (New York: Quarto, 2019b), pp. 70–75.Google Scholar
MacCormack, P., ‘Lovecraft’s Cosmic Ethics’, in Weinstock, Jeffrey and Sederholm, Carl (eds.), The Age of Lovecraft (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2016), pp. 199–215.Google Scholar
Malachuk, D., ‘Romanticism and Democracy’, in Loffler, Phillip, Spahr, Clemens, and Stievermann, Jan (eds.), Handbook of American Romanticism (Boston, MA: De Gruyter, 2021), pp. 143–161.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Marsh, C., ‘Stephen King Has Thoughts about Stephen King TV Shows’, The New York Times, 14 December 2020, www.nytimes.com/2020/12/14/arts/television/stephen-king-adaptations-the-stand.html. Accessed 2 October 2022.Google Scholar
Martin, R., Hero, Captain, and Stranger: Male Friendship, Social Critique, and Literary Form in the Sea Novels of Herman Melville (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1986).Google Scholar
McCann, A., Cultural Politics in the 1790s: Literature, Radicalism and the Public Sphere (New York: Palgrave, 1999).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McGowan, T., ‘Two Forms of Fetishism: From the Commodity to Revolution in Us’, Galactica Media: Journal of Media Studies, vol. 1, No. 1, (2019), 63–87.Google Scholar
McGowan, T., University and Identity Politics (New York: Columbia University Press, 2020).Google Scholar
Melville, H., ‘Charles’ Isle and the Dog-King’, in Hayford, Harrison (ed.), Herman Melville (New York: Library of America, 1984), pp. 788–792.Google Scholar
Melville, H., ‘Benito Cereno’, in McCall, Dan (ed.), Melville’s Short Novels (New York: W.W. Norton, 2001), pp. 34–102.Google Scholar
Mihic, S., ‘“The End Was in the Beginning”: Melville, Ellison, and the Democratic Death of Progress in Typee and Omoo,’ in Frank, Jason (ed.), A Political Companion to Herman Melville (Lexington, KY: University of Kentucky, 2014), n.p. Accessed as eBook.Google Scholar
Morrison, T., Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (New York: Vintage Books, 1992).Google Scholar
Mouffe, C., ‘Politics and Passions: The Stakes of Democracy’, Ethical Perspectives, vol. 7, no. 2 (2000), 146–150.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Olson, J., The Abolition of White Democracy (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2004).Google Scholar
Oppenheimer, J., Private Demons: The Life of Shirley Jackson (New York: Ballantine Books, 1989).Google Scholar
Paine, T., ‘The Rights of Man, Part 1’, in Foner, Eric (ed.), Thomas Paine: Collected Writings (New York: Library of America, 1995), pp. 433–540.Google Scholar
Palmer, R.R., The Age of the Democratic Revolution (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1969).Google Scholar
Paulson, R., Representations of Revolution: 1789–1820 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987).Google Scholar
Plot, M., The Aesthetico-Political: The Question of Democracy in Merleau-Ponty, Arendt, and Ranciere (New York: Bloomsbury, 2014).Google Scholar
Poe, E.A., ‘The Imp of the Perverse’, in Harrap, George G. (ed.), Poe’s Tales of Mystery and Imagination (New York: Weathervane Books, 1935), pp. 11–17.Google Scholar
Poe, E.A., ‘The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether’, in Quinn, Patrick (ed.), Edgar Allan Poe: Poetry and Tales (New York: Library of America, 1984), pp. 699–716.Google Scholar
Poe, E.A., ‘Colloquy of Monos and Una’, in Quinn, Patrick (ed.), Edgar Allan Poe: Poetry and Tales (New York: Library of America, 1984a), pp. 449–457.Google Scholar
Poe, E.A., ‘Mellonta Tauta’, in Quinn, Patrick (ed.), Edgar Allan Poe: Poetry and Tales (New York: Library of America, 1984b), pp. 871–885.Google Scholar
Poe, E.A., ‘The Pit and the Pendulum’, in Quinn, Patrick (ed.), Edgar Allan Poe: Poetry and Tales (New York: Library of America, 1984c), pp. 491–506.Google Scholar
Poe, E.A., ‘William Wilson’, in Quinn, Patrick (ed.), Edgar Allan Poe: Poetry and Tales (New York: Library of America, 1984d), pp. 337–357.Google Scholar
Rancière, J., Dis-Agreement: Politics and Philosophy, trans. Julie Rose (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1999).Google Scholar
Rancière, J., ‘Democracies against Democracy: An Interview with Eric Hazon’, in Allen, Amy (ed.), Democracy in What State? trans. William McCuaig (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), pp. 76–81.Google Scholar
Roberts, S., Gothic Subjects: The Transformation of Individualism in American Fiction (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rodriguez, R., ‘Sovereign Authority and the Democratic Subject in Poe’, Edgar Allan Poe Studies, vol. 44 (2016), 39–56.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rousseau, J., ‘The Social Contract’, in Scott, John T. (ed.), The Major Political Writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2014), pp. 153–273.Google Scholar
Schlesinger, A., A Pilgrim’s Progress: Orestes A. Brownson (Boston, MA: Little, Brown, 1966).Google Scholar
Sederholm, C., ‘Raising Her Voice: Stephen King’s Literary Dialogue with Shirley Jackson’, in Woofter, Kristopher (ed.), Shirley Jackson: A Companion, (New York: Peter Lang, 2021), pp. 59–73.Google Scholar
Smith, M., The First Forty Years of Washington Society (New York: Scribner’s Sons, 1906).Google Scholar
Smith, S., ‘What Kind of Democrat Was Spinoza?’ Political Theory, vol. 33, no. 1 (2005), 6–27.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Stocker, A., ‘Brown and the Godwinites’, in Barnard, P., Emmett, Hilary, and Shapiro, Stephen (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Charles Brockden Brown (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), pp. 273–288.Google Scholar
Baxley, C., Storm of the Century, DVD (Los Angeles, CA: Warner Bros, 1999) Television.Google Scholar
Taylor, A., Democracy May Not Exist, but We’ll Miss It When It’s Gone (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2019).Google Scholar
Tocqueville, A., Ancien Regime and the Revolution, trans. Gerald Bevan (New York: Penguin, 2008).Google Scholar
Tompkins, J., Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790–1860(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986).Google Scholar
Unger, M., ‘“Dens of Iniquity and Holes of Wickedness”: George Lippard and the Queer City’, Journal of American Studies, vol. 43, no. 2 (2009), 319–339.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Verhoeven, W. M., ‘“This Blissful Period of Intellectual Liberty”: Transatlantic Radicalism and Enlightened Conservatism in Brown’s Early Writings’, in Barnard, Philip, Kamrath, Mark, and Shapiro, Stephen (eds.), Revising Charles Brockden Brown: Culture, Politics, and Sexuality in the Early Republic (Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 2004), pp. 7–40.Google Scholar
West, C., Democracy Matters: Winning the Fight against Imperialism (New York: Penguin 2005).Google Scholar
Whitman, W., Democratic Vistas: Original Edition in Facsimile, Folsom, Ed (ed.) (Iowa City, IA: University of Iowa, 2010).Google Scholar
Wilentz, S., The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln (New York: W.W. Norton, 2005).Google Scholar
Wiltse, C., ‘King Andrew’, in Bugg, James (ed.), Jacksonian Democracy: Myth or Reality? (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1962), pp. 62–72.Google Scholar
Wollstonecraft, M., The Vindications of the Rights of Woman: Norton Critical Edition (New York: W.W. Norton, 1988).Google Scholar
Ziff, L., Literary Democracy: The Declaration of Cultural Independence in America (New York: Viking Press, 1981).Google Scholar
Žižek, S., ‘Introduction’, in Ducange, Jean (ed.), Robespierre: Virtue and Terror (London: Verso, 2017), pp. vii–li.Google Scholar
This Element is free online till 7th November 2024