Description

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This new Companion surveys the traditions and conventions of the dark side of American culture - its repressed memories, its anxieties and panics, its fears and horrors, its obsessions and paranoias. Featuring new critical essays by established and emerging academics from a range of national backgrounds, this collection offers new discussions and analyses of canonical and lesser-known texts in literature and film, television, photography, and video games. Its scope ranges from the earliest manifestations of American Gothic traditions in frontier narratives and colonial myths, to its recent responses to contemporary global events.

About the Author

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Joel Faflak is Professor of English and Theory at the University of Western Ontario. He is author of Romantic Psychoanalysis: The Burden of the Mystery (SUNY, 2008), co-author (with Ross Woodman) of Revelation and Knowledge: The Psyche in Romanticism (U of Toronto Press, 2011), and editor or co-editor of numerous essay collections and anthologies, most recently Romanticism and the Emotions (Cambridge UP, 2016), with Richard C. Sha, and William Blake: Modernity and Disaster (U of Toronto Press, 2020), with Tilottama Rajan. Jason Haslam is Associate Professor of English at Dalhousie University, past-president of the Canadian Association for American Studies, and president-elect of the Association of Canadian College and University Teachers of English. He is the author of Fitting Sentences: Identity in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Prison Narratives (2005), and editor of The Public Intellectual and the Culture of Hope (2013; with Joel Faflak), Captivating Subjects: Writing Confinement, Citizenship, and Nationhood in the Nineteenth Century (2005; with Julia M. Wright), and scholarly editions of both Edgar Rice Burroughs' Tarzan of the Apes (2010) and Constance Lytton's Prisons and Prisoners (2008).