Gothic images of race in nineteenth-century Britain
By: H.L. Malchow.
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: 1996
Place of publication: Stanford, Calif
Language: eng
Number of pages: 335
Subjects: English fiction -- 19th century -- History and criticism; Horror tales, English -- History and criticism; Race in literature; Popular culture -- Great Britain -- History -- 19th century; Gothic revival (Literature) -- Great Britain; Cannibalism in literature; Vampires in literature; Racism in literature
Other titles: Gothic images of race in 19th-century Britain
Description: In pursuing the sources for late eighteenth and nineteenth century "demonization" of racial and cultural difference, this book moves back and forth between the imagined world of literature and the "real" world of historical experience, between fictional romance and what has been called the "parallel fictions" of the human sciences of anthropology and biology.

The author argues that the gothic genre and its various permutations offered a language that could be appropriated, consciously or not, by racists in a powerful and obsessively reiterated evocation of terror, disgust, and alienation. But he shows that the gothic itself also evolved in the context of the brutal progress of European nationalism and imperialism, and absorbed much from them. This book explores both the gothicization of race and the racialization of the gothic as inseparable processes.

Appreciation of the pervasiveness of the gothic in nineteenth-century racial discourse is shown to be fundamental to understanding not only the ways in which racism drew strength from powerful and emotive images, but the linkages at both the conscious and unconscious levels with other areas of social discourse and prejudice: misogyny, homophobia, class snobbery, and popular revulsion at poverty, madness, and disease.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. [297]-319) and index.