Abstract
Chapter 6, Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet’s “Gothic Literature in America: The Nobrow Aesthetics of Murder and Madness”, brings up a steady diet of murdered doppelgängers, desecrated corpses, and queer incestuous family secrets, all found in the nobrow thrillethons from two mainstays of the nineteenth-century American literary canon, Edgar Allan Poe and Herman Melville. Taught from high schools to the Ivy Leagues, the two out-Goth the Goths in their drive to make money off the Gothic that suspect motherlode of genre fiction that branched out into modern horror, detective stories, science fiction, fantasy, and romance.
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Notes
- 1.
Quoted in Peeples, 2004, p. 64.
- 2.
- 3.
See McKeon, 1987.
- 4.
Whalen, 1999, p. 64.
- 5.
Halttunen, 1998, pp. 2–6.
- 6.
Whalen, 1999, p. 67.
- 7.
Muller and Richardson, 1987.
- 8.
- 9.
Poe, 1984a, p. 15.
- 10.
Poe, 1984a, p. 16.
- 11.
Elmer, 1995.
- 12.
Elmer, 1995, p. 175.
- 13.
- 14.
Whalen, 1999, pp. 68–69.
- 15.
Poe, 1984b, p. 233.
- 16.
Poe to White (30 April 1835), in Ostrom, 1948, pp. 57–58.
- 17.
Soltysik Monnet, 2010, pp. 38–45.
- 18.
Post, 2005, p. 108.
- 19.
New York Mirror, 13 April 1849, quoted in Post, 2005, p. 130.
- 20.
Review of Melville’s Moby-Dick, John Bull, 25 October 1851, quoted in Post, 2005, p. 109
- 21.
Hedges, 2014.
- 22.
Milder, 2005, p. 31
- 23.
- 24.
Melville, 1852/1971, p. 141.
- 25.
Melville, 1852/1971, p. 79.
- 26.
Edelman, 1994, p. 202.
- 27.
- 28.
Melville, 1852/1971, p. 216.
- 29.
Creech, 1993, pp. 55–59.
- 30.
Sedgwick, 1990, p. 3.
- 31.
See Lauter, 2001, chapter 10.
- 32.
James, 1999, p. 178 and 125.
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Soltysik Monnet, A. (2017). Gothic Literature in America. In: Swirski, P., Vanhanen, T. (eds) When Highbrow Meets Lowbrow. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-349-95168-0_6
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