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California Gothic explores the California dream and its dark inversion as a nightmare, as illustrated in fiction, poetry, and film. California began as a literary invention, a magic island, in a Spanish romance before conquistadors first visited the land. From early days to the present, the California dream of happiness in a land of new beginnings has been maintained by suppression of disturbing realities: above all, the destruction of native peoples; and by events and facts such as the tragedy of the Donner Party, the persistence of poverty and crime in the golden land, disturbing crimes such as the Black Dahlia; and pandemics and ecological disaster. This book explores a rich Gothic tradition that exposes the repressed past and imagines the fates awaiting a failed California.
This book is essential reading for anyone interested in California or the Gothic, and an exciting new field of investigation from a foundational figure of American Gothic scholarship. —Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet, University of Lausanne, Switzerland.
Contents; Chapter One- Dreams of the Magic Island; Chapter Two- Ambrose Bierce and San Francisco’s Gothic Frontier; Chapter Three- Lost Coasts; Chapter Four- Disease, Pandemics, and the Monstrous; Chapter Five- The Shadow Line: Noir and California Gothic; Chapter Six- California Ecogothic: What’s Buried in the Basement; Afterword