[Commlist] New Book: Gothic Things: Dark Enchantment and Anthropocene Anxiety

Jeffrey Weinstock is pleased to announce the publication of the new 
book, /Gothic Things: Dark Enchantment and Anthropocene Anxiety/, which 
may now be ordered in hardback, paperback, and ebook from Fordham 
University Press. 
https://www.fordhampress.com/9781531503420/gothic-things/ 
<https://www.fordhampress.com/9781531503420/gothic-things/>

Offering an innovative approach to the Gothic, /Gothic Things: Dark 
Enchantment and Anthro­pocene Anxiety /breaks ground with a new 
materialist analysis of the genre, highlighting the ways that, since its 
origins in the eighteenth century, the Gothic has been intensely focused 
on “ominous matter” and “thing power.” In chapters attending to gothic 
bodies, spaces, books, and other objects, /Gothic Things /argues that 
the Gothic has always been about what happens when objects assume 
mysterious animacy or potency and when human beings are reduced to the 
status of just one thing among many—more powerful—others.

In exploring how the Gothic insistently decenters the human, Jeffrey 
Andrew Weinstock reveals human beings to be enmeshed in networks of 
human and nonhuman forces mostly out­side of their control. /Gothic 
Things /thus resituates the Gothic as the uncanny doppelgänger of 
twenty-first-century critical and cultural theory, lurking just beneath 
the surface (and sometimes explicitly surfacing) as it haunts 
considerations of how human beings interact with objects and their 
environment. In these pages the Gothic offers a dark reflection of the 
contemporary “nonhuman turn,” expressing a twenty-first-century 
structure of feeling undergirded by anxiety over the fate of the human: 
spectrality, monstrosity, and apocalypse.

Substituting horror for hope, the Gothic, Weinstock explains, has been a 
philosophical medita­tion on human relations to the nonhuman since its 
inception, raising significant questions about how we can counter 
anthropocentric thought in our quest to live more harmoniously with the 
world around us.

"By fully engaging with theories of new materialism and applying them to 
numerous gothic 'things' – cursed objects, moving photographs, possessed 
dolls, corpses, found manuscripts, things that are alive that should not 
be, and things that simply should not be–Weinstock offers a complex and 
nuanced reading of the gothic and its importance in both theory and 
culture."*---Kevin J. Wetmore, Jr., Ph.D., editor of /Theatre and the 
Macabre/ and four time Bram Stoker Award nominee*

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