Gothic Matters of De-Composition: The Pastoral Dead in Contemporary American Fiction

Armstrong, John

dc.contributor.author	Armstrong, John	en
dc.date.accessioned	2017-02-03T15:25:19Z
dc.date.available	2017-02-03T15:25:19Z
dc.date.issued	2016-11-23	en
dc.identifier.issn	2083-2931	en
dc.identifier.uri	http://hdl.handle.net/11089/20464
dc.description.abstract	Against the backdrops of Terry Gifford’s post-pastoral and Fred Botting’s Gothic understanding of the literary corpse as “negative[ly] sublime,” this essay explores the fictional dead as matter unfettered by genre, consistently signifying beyond their own inanimate silences, revealing suppressed and unpalatable themes of racial and sexual violence, child abuse and cannibalistic consumerism. Along with Walker’s story, this study considers these ideas through new readings of Stephen King’s novella The Body, Raymond Carver’s story “So Much Water So Close to Home,” and The Road by Cormac McCarthy. While these writers may form an unlikely grouping in terms of style, each uses pastoral remains as significant material, deploying the dead as Gothic entities that force the reader to confront America’s darkest social and historical matters.	en
dc.publisher	Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Łódzkiego	en
dc.relation.ispartofseries	Text Matters;6	en
dc.rights	This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 3.0 License.	en
dc.rights.uri	http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0	en
dc.title	Gothic Matters of De-Composition: The Pastoral Dead in Contemporary American Fiction	en
dc.page.number	127-143	en
dc.contributor.authorAffiliation	National Formosa University, Taiwan, Province of China	en
dc.identifier.eissn	2084-574X
dc.references	Bartolovic, Crystal. “Consumerism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Cannibalism.” Cannibalism and Colonial World. Ed. Francis Barker, Peter Hulme and Margaret Iversen. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998. 204–37. GoogleBooks. Web. 16 Apr. 2015.	en
dc.references	Bloom, Harold. Alice Walker. New York: Infobase, 2007. Print.	en
dc.references	Botting, Fred. Gothic. New York: Routledge, 2014. Kindle file.	en
dc.references	Bruhm, Steven. “The Contemporary Gothic: Why We Need It.” The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction. Ed. Jerrold E. Hogle. Cambridge UP, 2009. 259–76. Cambridge Companions Online. Web. 30 Apr. 2015.	en
dc.references	Carver, Raymond. “So Much Water So Close to Home.” Fires: Essays, Poems, Stories. New York: Vintage Contemporaries, 1989. 185–204. Print.	en
dc.references	Gifford, Terry. “Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and a Post-Pastoral Theory of Fiction.” TerryGifford.co.uk. 2013. Web. 25 Apr. 2015.	en
dc.references	Gifford, Terry. Pastoral. Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2001. Kindle file.	en
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dc.references	Kolodny, Annette. The Lay of the Land: Metaphor as Experience and History in American Life and Letters. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1984. GoogleBooks. Web. 19 Apr. 2015.	en
dc.references	Kristeva, Julia. The Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia UP, 1980. GoogleBooks. Web. 19 Apr. 2015.	en
dc.references	Lainsbury, G.P. The Carver Chronotope: Contextualizing Raymond Carver. New York: Routledge, 2004. GoogleBooks. Web. 18 Apr. 2015.	en
dc.references	Marx, Leo. The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America. New York: Oxford UP, 2000. Kindle file.	en
dc.references	McCarthy, Cormac. The Road. New York: Picador, 2010. Kindle file.	en
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dc.references	Oswald, Dana. “Monstrous Gender: Geographies of Ambiguity.” The Ashgate Research Companion to Monsters and the Monstrous. Ed. Asa Simon Mittman with Peter J. Dendle. Farnham: Ashgate, 2012. 343–64. GoogleBooks. Web. 16 Apr. 2015.	en
dc.references	The Road. Dir. John Hillcote. Weinstein, 2009. DVD.	en
dc.references	Sanghani, Radhika. “Teenage Boys Addicted to ‘Extreme’ Porn and Want Help.” The Telegraph. The Telegraph 30 Sep. 2013. Web. 14 Apr. 2015.	en
dc.references	Sears, John. Stephen King’s Gothic. Cardiff: U of Wales P, 2011. GoogleBooks. Web. 16 Apr. 2015.	en
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dc.identifier.doi	10.1515/texmat-2016-0008	en

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