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.

About the Author
Cannon Schmitt is Professor of English at the University of Toronto.

Reviews
"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 *



Book Information
ISBN 9780812233513
Author Cannon Schmitt
Format Hardback
Page Count 232
Imprint University of Pennsylvania Press
Publisher University of Pennsylvania Press