Introduction
Nineteenth-Century American Gothic Literature
This pressbook is the course anthology for ENGL 386. It includes full texts of representative gothic novels and short stories in the public domain, spanning just over 100 years. The works included here are organized into thematic sections that will structure the course: frontier gothic, puritan gothic, and haunted houses/abject selves. These themes are linked by core concerns that span the course as a whole—with anxieties about boundaries (between race, gender, and class), inheritances (the intellectual promise of equality set against the violence of colonization, the lingering impact of puritanism, and the contradictions that haunted the American psyche in the final decades of the era.