Abstract
This chapter offers an introduction to the emerging critical study of Colonial Gothic writing by women who resided in Great Britain as well as within the broader regions which made up the British Empire from the mid-nineteenth century to the early decades of the twentieth. The chapter begins with an exploration of the major themes that recur in women’s Colonial Gothic. The chapter goes on to consider the critical history of women’s Gothic writing and how the genre can be read as a form of social critique, which Edmundson terms the “social supernatural.” The melding of themes within women’s Gothic and the colonial/postcolonial Gothic is then explored to show how the two strains of the Gothic complement one another in their shared emphasis on narratives which foreground personal experience and trauma in order to subvert dominant cultural and political ideologies.
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Edmundson, M. (2018). Introduction: Reclaiming Women’s Colonial Gothic Writing. In: Women’s Colonial Gothic Writing, 1850-1930. Palgrave Gothic. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-76917-2_1
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