Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in
Palgrave Macmillan

Women’s Colonial Gothic Writing, 1850-1930

Haunted Empire

  • Book
  • © 2018

Overview

Authors:
  1. Melissa Edmundson

    1. Clemson University, Clemson, USA

    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed   Google Scholar

  • Provides women’s perspectives on colonialism from across the British Empire
  • Includes women’s literary responses to the British Empire
  • Discusses the Gothic as a critique of imperialism and women’s Colonial Gothic as social critique
  • Presents new directions in the study of both women’s Gothic writing and women’s colonial writing

Part of the book series: Palgrave Gothic (PAGO)

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this book

Log in via an institution
eBook USD 59.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book USD 79.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info
Hardcover Book USD 119.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Durable hardcover edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Other ways to access

Licence this eBook for your library

Institutional subscriptions

Table of contents (12 chapters)

  1. Front Matter

    Pages i-x
    Download chapter PDF

  2. Introduction: Reclaiming Women’s Colonial Gothic Writing

    • Melissa Edmundson
    Pages 1-21

  3. Susanna Moodie, Colonial Exiles, and the Frontier Canadian Gothic

    • Melissa Edmundson
    Pages 23-43

  4. Gothic Romance and Retribution in the Short Fiction of Isabella Valancy Crawford

    • Melissa Edmundson
    Pages 45-72

  5. Generations of the Female Vampire: Colonial Gothic Hybridity in Florence Marryat’s The Blood of the Vampire

    • Melissa Edmundson
    Pages 73-94

  6. Mary Kingsley and the Ghosts of West Africa

    • Melissa Edmundson
    Pages 95-114

  7. The African Stories of Margery Lawrence

    • Melissa Edmundson
    Pages 115-138

  8. Colonial Gothic Framework: Haunted Houses in the Anglo-Indian Ghost Stories of Bithia Mary Croker

    • Melissa Edmundson
    Pages 139-156

  9. Animal Gothic in Alice Perrin’s East of Suez

    • Melissa Edmundson
    Pages 157-176

  10. The Past Will Not Stay Buried: Female Bodies and Colonial Crime in the Australian Ghost Stories of Mary Fortune

    • Melissa Edmundson
    Pages 177-195

  11. Fear and Death in the Outback: Barbara Baynton’s Bush Studies

    • Melissa Edmundson
    Pages 197-216

  12. Katherine Mansfield and the Troubled Homes of Colonial New Zealand

    • Melissa Edmundson
    Pages 217-238

  13. Conclusion: “Cicatrice of an Old Wound”

    • Melissa Edmundson
    Pages 239-244

  14. Back Matter

    Pages 245-258
    Download chapter PDF
Back to top

Keywords

About this book

This book explores women writers’ involvement with the Gothic. The author sheds new light on  women’s experience, a viewpoint that remains largely absent from male-authored Colonial Gothic works. The book  investigates how  women writers appropriated the Gothic genre—and its emphasis on fear, isolation, troubled identity, racial otherness, and sexual deviancy—in order to take these anxieties into the farthest realms of the British Empire. The chapters show how Gothic themes told from a  woman’s perspective emerge in unique ways when set in the different colonial regions that comprise the scope of this book: Canada, the Caribbean, Africa, India, Australia, and New Zealand. Edmundson argues that women’s Colonial Gothic writing tends to be more critical of imperialism, and thereby more subversive, than that of their male counterparts. This book will be of interest to students and academics interested in women’s writing, the Gothic, and colonial studies.      

Reviews

“Melissa Edmundson’s study is an impressive volume that will probably prove influential in the field of Gothic Studies. … This volume provides an excellent foundation upon which Edmundson or other scholars might build. ... Edmundson introduces us to several strangers in strange lands on whom future scholarship might focus. This is an important step in the reclamation of marginalized voices, both academically and politically commendable.” (Eleanor Dobson, Modern Language Review, Vol. 114 (3), July, 2019) “Edmundson’s book is a veritable treasure trove of undiscovered women’s postcolonial and Gothic work and fills an amazing gap in our understanding, which ranges round British and American, some colonial Gothic, nineteenth century work, early twentieth century and contemporary work. The scholarship and the focus are impeccable, using established and new critics’ work on gender, the Gothic and postcolonial writing to provide a new reading of a very under researched area.” (Gina Wisker, University of Brighton, UK)

Authors and Affiliations

  • Clemson University, Clemson, USA

    Melissa Edmundson

About the author

Melissa Edmundson is Lecturer of English at Clemson University and specializes in 19th- and 20th- century British women writers, ghost stories, the Gothic, and Anglo-Indian popular fiction. She is the author of Women's Ghost Literature in Nineteenth-Century Britain (2013). 



Bibliographic Information

Publish with us

Policies and ethics

Back to top

Search

Navigation