Edinburgh Napier University

  ‘Ecocriticism and the Genre’ explores a recent and topical development in Gothic scholarship, the ecogothic. Gothic literature often exhibits a fascination with sublime, terrifying, and horrifying aspects of the natural world, its creatures, plants, and landscapes, while ecocriticism, particularly in the face of current urgent ecological problems, often turns to Gothic tropes and ways of thinking to theorise human relationships (both the good and the bad) with the more-than-human world. This chapter outlines origins and definitions of ecogothic, discusses relationships between the Gothic and ecocriticism, and includes three case studies, on Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), Megan Hunter’s The End We Start From (2017), and the YA Gothic of David Almond.