Gothic Passages: Racial Ambiguity and the American Gothic Book

Preface xi
Acknowledgments xiii
Introduction xvii
PART ONE
Creating a Self in the Antebellum Gothic Narrative
1. Hybrid Bodies and Gothic Narratives in Poe's Pym 3
2. Gothic Travels in Melville's Benito Cereno 18
3. Passing and Abjection in William and Ellen Craft's Running
a Thousand Miles for Freedom 34
PART TWO
Exploring Identity in Postbellum Gothic Discourse
4. The Epistemology of the Body; or, Gothic Secrets in
Frances E. W. Harper's Iola Leroy 53
5. Genetic Atavism and the Return of the Repressed in
William Dean Howells's An Imperative Duty 72
6. The Haunted House behind the Cedars: Charles W. Chesnutt
and the "White Negro" 88
Epilogue: Twentieth-Century Gothicism and
Racial Ambiguity

Notes 115
Works Cited 123
Index 141