American Gothic

The chilling creativity of the American Gothic has retained its power to attract readers since it burst onto the literary scene in the eighteenth century, yet it has been the object of serious scholarship for only a few decades. Edited by a founding member of the International Gothic Association, the new edition of this anthology incorporates the whole range of factual and imaginative writing, from Cotton Mather's account of the witchcraft trials in the colonial era, through the poetry of Poe, Dickinson, and Longfellow and unsettling tales both long (Henry James's The Turn of the Screw)and short (the anonymous "Talking Bones"), to the beginning of modernism in the twentieth century.

The collection demonstrates the startling abundance of themes explored by these writers and reflects contemporary academic perspectives, with generous selections from genres such as feminist and "wilderness" Gothic. This new edition benefits from more than ten years of suggestions from readers and teachers while still offering prose and poetry from luminaries such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Henry James, Stephen Crane, Jack London, and Edith Wharton. It includes recently unearthed as well as canonical material and provides an unflinching view of America's secrets and fears: the thoughts that have been repressed, silenced, or forbidden. All editorial materials have been revised for this new edition, which includes brand-new selections such as the captivity narrative of Hannah Dustan, Madeline Yale Wynne's "The Little Room," Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper," and H. P. Lovecraft's "The Outsider."