An urgent volume of essays engages the Gothic to advance important perspectives on our geological era

 

What can the Gothic teach us about our current geological era? More than just spooky, moonlit castles and morbid graveyards, the Gothic represents a vibrant, emergent perspective on the Anthropocene. In this volume, more than a dozen scholars move beyond longstanding perspectives on the Anthropocene—such as science fiction and apocalyptic narratives—to show that the Gothic offers a unique (and dark) interpretation of events like climate change, diminished ecosystems, and mass extinction.

Embracing pop cultural phenomena like True Detective, Jaws, and Twin Peaks, as well as topics from the New Weird and prehistoric shark fiction to ruin porn and the “monstroscene,” Dark Scenes from Damaged Earth demonstrates the continuing vitality of the Gothic while opening important new paths of inquiry. These essays map a genealogy of the Gothic while providing fresh perspectives on the ongoing climate chaos, the North/South divide, issues of racialization, dark ecology, questions surrounding environmental justice, and much more.

Contributors: Fred Botting, Kingston U; Timothy Clark, U of Durham; Rebecca Duncan, Linnaeus U; Michael Fuchs, U of Oldenburg, Germany; Esthie Hugo, U of Warwick; Dawn Keetley, Lehigh U; Laura R. Kremmel, South Dakota School of Mines and Technology; Timothy Morton, Rice U; Barry Murnane, U of Oxford; Jennifer Schell, U of Alaska Fairbanks; Lisa M. Vetere, Monmouth U; Sara Wasson, Lancaster U; Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock, Central Michigan U.

How does culture influence human relationships with the environment? In Monstrous Nature and Representations of Environmental Harms, green cultural criminologists Avi Brisman and Nigel South examine stories of monsters and disasters to address how the ways we depict and think about harms to the environment dissuade us from taking care of our planet and each other.

The authors use examples from popular culture, including Disney and Marvel Cinematic Universe films, to consider ideas about how the environment responds to people who cause it harm. Brisman and South identify and discuss three dominant and interrelated depictions of the relationship between humans and the environment: first, nature as monstrous or fear inducing; second, nature and the Earth (or parts of it) as abject; and third, the entanglement of nature and the apocalypse, wherein nature is contributing to the end of the world, with an end point sometimes conceptualized as one without humans.​

Monstrous Nature and Representations of Environmental Harms argues that such representations have material consequences. The authors make the case for challenging them so that we neither perpetuate them nor retreat into cynicism and defeatism about the future of our planet.