The American Imperial Gothic

Ranging from the Cold War to the recent War on Terror, Dr Johan Hglund's precise, ambitious and thought-provoking study marks the return of (contemporary) politics to where it has always lurked, darkly - in the very heart of Gothic literature. Tabish Khair, Aarhus University, Denmark Original, timely, and solidly researched, The American Imperial Gothic challenges orthodoxies about American culture and casts the American Gothic in a new and darker light, revealing the complex collusion between the entertainment industry and Americas history of militarism in the long twentieth century. Hglunds book offers an important contribution to American Studies and Gothic Studies alike! Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet, University of Lausanne, Switzerland '... the utility and timeliness of the concept of the American imperial gothic outlined in this book makes it an important contribution to the field of American cultural studies and it will surely be widely cited in the literature, and deservedly find its way onto undergraduate reading lists across a range of disciplines.' Stephen Connor, Viewfinder Online 'While American Imperial Gothic is a fairly easy and quick read, it successfully takes on the complicated workings-across a nations lifetime, no less-of the web of politics, history, popular culture, and power in the United States.' Science Fiction studies 'Johan Hglunds latest volume narrows its focus from the world to America in eleven enlightening chapters. As with his former co-edited title, again libraries should buy this latest, but so should readers interested in dark-souled films and search-and-destroy computer games. ... For cineastes, the pleasure is in reading the abundance of films Hoglund raises for their telling details, for their showing of a monstrous version of draining imperialism.' Gothic Imagination 'As a historically-grounded and theoretically-informed exploration of popular cultural texts that engages with debates in P "In an epoch defined by ongoing concerns regarding terrorism, justice and the need to prevent further humanitarian disasters, Hglunds work serves as a stark reminder of the conservative and reactionary possibilities of the gothic. As the conclusion of this work suggests, the West is perhaps not as far removed from its imperialistic tendencies as it may hope." Kaja Franck, University of Hertfordshire, The British Society for Literature and Science

Johan Hglund is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at Linnaeus University, Sweden. He is a member of Linnaeus University Centre for Concurrences in Postcolonial Studies and his most recent publications include Transnational and Postcolonial Vampires: Dark Blood (2012), 'Parables for the Paranoid: Affect and the War Gothic' in Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies (2013) and 'Black Englishness and the Concurrent Voices of Richard Marsh in The Surprising Husband' in English Literature in Transition (2013).

Contents: Preface; Introduction: the American imperial gothic; Imperial frontier gothic; The gothic of benevolent assimilation; Cold War horror; Post-Vietnam gothic; 11 September and the gothic war on terror; Afghanistan, Iraq and the new frontiers of the imperial gothic; Militarising the virtual gothic; Tales of torture and invasion; The imperial gothic of the post-Apocalypse; Conclusion; Bibliography; Index.