African American Gothic—Screams from Shadowed Places

Anyone who has seen a horror film or read a Stephen King novel is familiar with gothic tropes: dark villains who never tire of chasing hapless maidens; supernatural monsters; heroes who are sometimes weak; twisted, yet uncannily familiar, landscapes; the list goes on. Yet the gothic is more than a long list of tropes deployed to terrify. African American Gothic reveals the myriad ways African American writers manipulate the gothic genre to critique traditional racial ideologies. The book investigates fiction from each major era in African American culture, including Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, Of One Blood, Cane, Invisible Man, and Corregidora, to show how the gothic—when revised—serves as a useful vehicle for the enunciation of the peculiar terrors and complexities of black existence in America.