Description:
This book argues that travel in Gothic literature offers a unique and transformative perspective on recurring cultural preoccupations with fear, unknown landscapes, environmental change, surveillance, and the foreign.
Review Quotes:
The book excels in its sharp self-awareness of its own relevance, not only in capturing the "creeping unease" of our response to climate change and other effects of the Anthropocene but also in articulating the strange hyperawareness of seclusion and mobility brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic. -SEL Studies in English Literature 1500-1900.
"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.