Concurrences Member Publishes New Cambridge Companion
Concurrences member Rebecca Duncan (Researcher and Associate Professor in the Department of Languages) has recently published The Cambridge Companion to World-Gothic Literature, co-edited with Rebekah Cumpsty (Weber State University, US).
The Companion makes a substantial intervention in studies of world-literature and the gothic, by situating 'gothic literature' -- usually understood as a form originating in industrialising Britain -- in the context of colonial/capitalist modernity, which begins with the invasion and colonisation of the Americas. Located in this way, the early British re-emerges as a belated response to capitalist transformation, one anticipated by myriad spectres haunting the plantations of the so-called ‘New World’. Gothic did not begin in Britain, and then become global over time. Rather, as the volume reveals, gothic has always been world-gothic: a way of dealing with the alienation and anxiety that erupt with capitalist modernisation, when- and wherever this is taking place.
Essays in the volume chart the new links and comparisons enabled by this insight, renovating established gothic concepts and outlining groundbreaking new theoretical infrastructure. Together, chapters provincialise the “western” gothic tradition, in order to open up new possibilities for world-gothic reading.
Rebecca's research for this project was generously supported by a Riksbankens Jubileumsfond grant, which ran 2021-2024.