Gothic Things

Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock is Professor of English at Central Michigan University and associate editor in charge of horror for the Los Angeles Review of Books. His most recent books include Giving the Devil His Due: Satan and Cinema (with Regina Hansen, Fordham, 2021), The Monster Theory Reader (University of Minnesota Press, 2020), and The Cambridge Companion to the American Gothic (Cambridge University Press, 2018). Visit him at JeffreyAndrewWeinstock.com.

Preface: Three Beginnings vii Introduction: Ominous Matter 1 1 Gothic Thing Theory 19 2 Dark Enchantment and Gothic Materialism 41 3 Body-as-Thing 72 4 Thing-as- Body 91 5 Book: How to Do Things with Words 115 6 Building: Bigger on the Inside 137 Epilogue: The Ominous Matter of One's Ordinary Life 171 Acknowledgments 173 Notes 175 Works Cited 181 Index 195

This is a vital and exuberant work, theoretically informed, clear, and hugely engaging. Weinstock grapples with the ways some strands of gothic play out in contemporary environmental theory. In addition, he poses important challenges to that theory, and throughout the book demonstrates commitment to ethics, justice and intellectual rigour. As one panelist says, 'asks big conceptual questions about the purpose and meaning of Gothic and the cultural work it does'.---Sara Wasson, Chair of the International Gothic Association's Allan Lloyd Smith Prize I recommend Weinstock's Gothic Things as an innovative work that explains the links between the Gothic tropes and new theories, allowing Gothic scholars to reframe arguments in a contemporaneous manner, and provides principal authors for each theory along with reviews of fictional books and movies that create an extensive to be-read/watched list for researchers.---Naomi von Senff, MONSTRUM Journal 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