Description
Book SynopsisThe Gothic has always been interested in strange utterances and unsettling voices: from half-heard ghostly murmurings and the admonitions of the dead, to the terrible cries of the monstrous nonhuman. Gothic Utterance offers the first book-length study of the role such voices play in the Gothic tradition, exploring their prominence and importance in the American literature produced between the Revolutionary War and the close of the nineteenth century. This book argues that the American Gothic foregrounds the overpowering affect and distressing significations of the voices of the dead, dying, abjected, marginalised or nonhuman, in order to undertake a sustained interrogation of what it means to be and speak as an American in this period. The American Gothic imagines new forms of relation between speaking subjects, positing more inclusive and expansive forms of community. Gothic Utterance also emphasises the ethical demands attending our encounters with Gothic voices: the Gothic suggests that how we choose to hear and respond to these voices says much about our relationship with the world around us, its inhabitants - dead or otherwise - and the limits of our own subjectivity and empathy.
Trade Review"Articulately and elegantly written, the force of this groundbreaking book goes in two directions. It reflects powerfully on the role of utterances, voices, and sounds of all kinds in the Gothic; and it develops a strong argument about the centrality of vocal utterance to the development and establishment of American cultural self-conception." --David Punter, University of Bristol -- David Punter, University of Bristol * University of Wales Press *
"With its fascinating focus on ventriloquism and unintelligible speech, animal noises, and other types of sound, Jimmy Packham’s Gothic Utterance issues a clarion call to attend to the neglected roles of voice and sound in American Gothic and the Gothic more broadly. Researchers into the Gothic will want to listen carefully to what it has to say!" --Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock, Central Michigan University -- Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock, Central Michigan University * University of Wales Press *
"The Gothic is always telling people something they don’t want to hear: our consciences can’t be killed; past sins, our own or our ancestors’, will ultimately be revealed; and we’re generally not who we think we are. In
Gothic Utterance: Voice, Speech, and Death in the American Gothic, Jimmy Packham demonstrates how frequently, in US fiction of the long nineteenth century, the Gothic literally speaks, through the voices of the dead, the undead, and the dying, as well as the traumatized, the outcast, the nonhuman, and the wilderness. . . . a fresh rereading of a wide swath of nineteenth-century American texts." * American Literary History *
Table of ContentsIntroduction: American Biloquism Part I: Gothic Utterance and Selfhood 1. Deadly Locution and Delphic Shrieks: Haunted Significance and the Self 2. Cries and Whispers: Spectral Voice, Community and Gothic Consciousness Part II: Voices, Soundscapes, Histories 3. Howls and Echoes: Frontier Gothic and the Voice of the Wilderness 4. (Dis)embodied Utterance and the Peripatetic Voice: Hearing the Haunted Plantation 5. Squawking Soldiers and the Babbling Corpse: War-torn Words and Civil War Gothic Conclusion: Quoth the Gothic
