Alien Nation
Nineteenth-Century Gothic Fictions and English Nationality

Cannon Schmitt

232 pages | 5 1/2 x 8 1/2
Cloth 1997 | ISBN 978-0-8122-3351-3 | $55.00s | £36.00 | Add to shopping cart
A volume in the New Cultural Studies series

"Schmitt's account of the political function and fate of the Gothic during the course of a century is both topical and engaging. His thesis that the Gothic participated in the construction of an English national identity has the potential not just to enrich more familiar versions of the Gothic but to compel that discourse into relation with current studies of 'nation and narration' in postcolonial literature."—Janet Gezari, Connecticut College

Rife with sexuality, chaos, confusion, and terror, the Gothic has seemed to many of its recent readers to be a subversive genre, resisting enforced gender constructions or straitened notions of rationality, disinterring that which has been forbidden or repressed. In Alien Nation Cannon Schmitt moves away from these models of the genre to chart, instead, the ways in which Gothic fictions and conventions gave shape to a sense of English nationality during the century in which British imperial power was stretching out its greatest reach.

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