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Winner of the International Gothic Association's Allan Lloyd Smith Prize 2022.
Shortlisted for the British Society of Literature and Science Book Prize 2020.
Transplantation Gothic is a shadow cultural history of transplantation, as mediated through medical writing, science fiction, life writing and visual arts in a Gothic mode, from the nineteenth-century to the present. The works explore the experience of donor/suppliers, recipients and practitioners, and simultaneously express transfer-related suffering and are complicit in its erasure. Examining texts from Europe, North America and India, the book resists exoticising predatorial tissue economies and considers fantasies of harvest as both product and symbol of structural ruination under neoliberal capitalism. In their efforts to articulate bioengineered hybridity, these works are not only anxious but speculative. The book will be of interest to academics and students researching Gothic studies, science fiction, critical medical humanities and cultural studies of transplantation.
Winner of the International Gothic Association's Allan Lloyd Smith Prize 2022.
Shortlisted for the British Society of Literature and Science Book Prize 2020.
'Sara Wasson’s Transplantation Gothic is a critical tour de force. Suturing together the medical humanities, contemporary critical theory and insights gleaned from Gothic Studies, the book advances a series of brilliant readings of a broad range of literary and filmic texts, encompassing as it does so such genres and modes as nineteenth-century British Gothic fiction, twentieth-century American horror and postmillennial science fiction and dystopian writing. Resolutely interdisciplinary, it treats fiction and film alongside scientific writing and life writing, offering a truly exhilarating account of the ways in which the Gothic is, at once, critical of, and complicit in, the practice of organ transplantation in modern and contemporary Europe, North America and India. As deeply invested in its subject matter as it is, Transplantation Gothic also articulates, in the end, a political methodology and an ethical praxis that bears important implications for cultural criticism well beyond the immediate field of the Gothic. I have no doubt that this book is destined to become a landmark volume.'
Dale Townshend, Professor of Gothic Literature, Manchester Centre for Gothic Studies.
‘…a watershed moment in the history of medical Gothic.’
Fantastika Journal
'This book provides a necessary and timely intervention into (re)considering the slow violence(s) wrought upon our own bodies and communities.'
The Polyphony
Introduction: bodies dis(re)membered: Gothic and the transplant imaginary
1 Clinical necropoetics: medical and ethics writing of death and transplantation
2 The bioemporium: corporate medical horror in late twentieth century American transfer fiction
3 Clinical labour and slow violence: transnational harvest horror and racial vulnerability at the turn of the millennium
4 Possession? Uncanny assemblage and embodied scripts in tissue recipient horror
5 Scalpel and metaphor: ‘machines of social death’ and state sanctioned harvest in dystopian fiction
Coda: writing wounds
Index