Includes bibliographical references (pages 223-230) and index.
Contents:
Introduction. Possessions: property and propriety in the English Gothic mode -- Part I. Castle and moat: property possession in the English Gothic. Slippery properties: The castle of Otranto and The old English baron -- A century of loss: historical contexts for property anxieties -- Fantasies of return: property restoration imagined -- Nineteenth-century expansions -- Part II. Ghosts: possession of person in the English Gothic. Self-(dis)possession in The woman in white -- Dispossessions of the mind and the body: a Gothic tropology -- The double and the ghost: refusals of self-(dis)possession -- Resurrection fantasies: defying death's dispossessions -- Slavery and marriage: Gothic reflections of political rhetoric -- Missing mothers and suppressed sisters: the dangers of primogeniture -- Part III. Fragmented stories: appropriated voices: possession of the narrative in the English Gothic -- Gothic conventions: narrative dispossessions -- Contexts of contested narratives: can the text be possessed? -- The theology of narrative dispossession in Maturin's Melmoth the wanderer -- Dispossessed and dispossessing: the wandering Jew's possession of voice and narrative -- Part IV. Beyond the end: dispossessing closure. "It is only the theory I want": repossessing fiction in Sarah Waters's Affinity -- The political fantastic -- Conclusion. Toward a transatlantic investigation: possession and dispossession in American Gothic literature.
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.