Overview

This book argues that the process and experience of travel in Gothic literature provides a unique and transformative perspective on the relationship between fear and recurring cultural preoccupations from the late eighteenth century to the present, ranging from concerns about climate change or the presence of the unseen to the negotiation of cultural difference and the apprehension produced by various modes of modern transport and unknown/unknowable terrain. The book follows travellers who take many fictional forms tourists, commuters, walkers, explorers, as well as the 'armchair tourist' or reader as they encounter fascinating, strange and often disconcerting weathers, climates, landscapes and topographies. Gothic travel epitomises the wonder, excitement, suspicion or incomprehension that arises from journeys through familiar and unfamiliar terrain. While exposure to the wild, elemental or primitive could produce the elevation of the sublime in early Gothic, increasingly the experience of travel raised unsettling questions about people, places and environments that lay beyond established frames of knowledge. Gothic travellers are haunted, never alone, and the experience of journeying through these landscapes provokes fears that may shadow them even after they have returned to 'home' ground. Climates of Fear reveals the persistent ways in which Gothic narratives of travel confront fears about the environment, surveillance, (im)migration and the foreign. These abiding concerns speak loudly to the present time, however, when the encroachments on our immediate surroundings from climate change, digital communication and geopolitical dislocation seem at once remote and intimate, invisible yet urgent. Thus the book also asks whether recent portrayals of Gothic journeys now pose different questions to the reader.

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9781839980213

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Reviews

What does it mean to walk with ghosts? In this book, Lucie Armitt and Scott Brewster explore this intriguing question via the guiding metaphor of the spectral footfall. Traversing both real and imaginary terrains, we walk here in the fashion of restless Gothic wanderers through variously conceptualised 'climates of fear', from the Polar regions of the frozen north to the balmier climes of South-West France, contemplating as we do so a question that has come to define much of the modern age: 'Who is the third who walks always beside you?' - Dale Townshend, Professor of Gothic Literature, Manchester Centre for Gothic Studies. This stimulating and authoritative book firmly links key features and works of the Gothic to travel, journeying and particularly walking. Ranging across the centuries and among landscapes including coastline, marsh and wild mountain, the authors search out vivid sites of haunting, deploying both fictional and historical sources to remarkable effect. - David Punter, Professor of Poetry, University of Bristol, UK. At long last we have here an engagingly written and richly revealing study that shows how the oft-noted, but rarely examined, incorporation of travel writing into Gothic fiction - and vice-versa - has given symbolic resonances to journeys through spaces that thereby become uniquely uncanny and are now pervasive in Western culture. - Jerrold E. Hogle, Professor Emeritus of English University Distinguished Professor University of Arizona.

Author Information

Lucie Armitt is a professor of Contemporary English Literature at University of Lincoln, UK. Scott Brewster is a reader in Modern English Literature at University of Lincoln, UK.

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