• Introduction: The Proliferation of the Ecogothic
• Matthew Wynn Sivils (bio)

The ecogothic probes the dark and earthy unknowns of the literary landscape, upending creekside stones and dipping dirty fingernails into feculent pools—ever reaching for some mysterious, quivering thing. As the name implies, this still-nascent critical approach explores the interpretive possibilities found at the junction between traditional gothic literary study and the array of methodologies and concerns that comprise the environmental humanities.

Indeed, gothic anxieties haunt some of our most environmentally focused works of literature, and conversely, non-human elements emerge, often in disturbing ways, in texts more conventionally placed under the label of the gothic. Once we start looking, the ecogothic seems to sprout up everywhere, proliferating across texts like mushrooms after a spring rain, an ever-present literary lifeform hidden just beneath the surface. It glows in the eyes of Edgar Huntly’s panthers; it joins in the din of “waddling fungus growths [that] shriek with derision!” from “The Yellow Wall-Paper”; and it rises into the tree-shaped whip scar upon Sethe’s back.¹ Possessed of an uncanny, fragmented omnipresence, the ecogothic looks back at us from across the page, “Like a tree / In which there are three blackbirds.”²

Early stirrings of ecogothic criticism appear in the work of scholars such as Jonathan Bate, Leslie Fiedler, and Yi-Fu Tuan, but for the most part this critical approach began to take shape in the mid-to-late 2000s. Critics such as Stacy Alaimo, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Simon C. Estok, Tom J. Hillard, Timothy Morton, Lee Rozelle, and others began to variously connect ecocriticism with the gothic, a literary mode that had, to that point, taken a back seat to more bucolic works of nature writing. Estok’s 2009 article “Theorizing in a Space of Ambivalent Openness: Ecocriticism and Ecophobia” proved especially influential in redirecting our focus toward the more terrifying aspects of the environmental [End Page 1] imagination. Defining ecophobia as “an irrational and groundless hatred of the natural world,” Estok argues it is “as present and subtle in our daily lives and literature as homophobia and racism and sexism.”³ In this formulation, ecophobia is, at its core, about the human struggle for control over the non-human world and the terror and dread that arises when we fail to maintain that control. In an article from later that same year, Tom J. Hillard, building upon Estok’s ideas, further sets the stage when he contends, “Because Gothic literature is so obsessed with fears of all types, the Gothic provides a useful lens for understanding the ways that many authors—regardless of when they are writing—represented fears and anxieties about the natural world.”⁴

Over the last decade or so, critics have worked to more precisely define this approach, which has since come to be called the ecogothic. In the introduction to their 2013 critical anthology, EcoGothic (the first book-length study on the subject), Andrew Smith and William Hughes write, “The Gothic . . . provides a culturally significant point of contact between literary criticism, ecocritical theory and political process.” While underscoring the ecogothic’s origins in Romanticism, Smith and Hughes argue that contemporary texts are informed by environmental concerns that the Romantics could never have imagined, such as climate change and the “political urgency of ecological issues.”⁵ In the introduction to the 2014 special issue of Gothic Studies on “The EcoGothic in the Long Nineteenth-Century,” David Del Principe writes, “the EcoGothic serves to give voice to ingrained biases and a mounting ecophobia—fears stemming from humans’ precarious relationship with all that is nonhuman.”⁶ Dawn Keetley and I, in our introduction to the 2017 critical anthology Ecogothic in Nineteenth-Century American Literature, write that since “ecocriticism has devoted itself to studying the literary and cultural relationships of humans to the nonhuman world” that “adopting a specifically gothic ecocritical lens illuminates the fear, anxiety, and dread that often pervade those relationships.”⁷ And in her 2020 book The Forest and the EcoGothic, Elizabeth Parker writes that “the ecoGothic is a flavoured mode through which we can examine our darker, more complicated cultural representations of the nonhuman world—which are all the...

• 简介：生态哥特式的扩散
• 马修·韦恩·西维尔斯（简介）

生态哥特式探索文学景观中黑暗而朴实的未知，翻转溪边的石头，将肮脏的指甲浸入肮脏的水池中——永远伸手去触碰一些神秘的、颤抖的东西。顾名思义，这种仍处于萌芽状态的批判方法探索了传统哥特式文学研究与构成环境人文学科的一系列方法论和关注点之间的结合点所发现的解释可能性。

事实上，哥特式焦虑困扰着我们一些最关注环境的文学作品，相反，非人类元素经常以令人不安的方式出现在更传统地贴在哥特式标签下的文本中。一旦我们开始观察，生态哥特似乎到处都在萌芽，像春雨后的蘑菇一样在文本中扩散，成为隐藏在表面之下的一种永远存在的文学生命形式。它在埃德加·亨特利的黑豹眼中闪闪发光；它加入了“摇摇晃晃的真菌生长的喧嚣，嘲笑地尖叫！”摘自《黄色墙纸》；它上升到塞丝背上树形的鞭痕中。¹生态哥特式拥有一种不可思议的、支离破碎的无所不在，从书页的另一边回头看着我们，“就像一棵树/里面有三只黑鸟。” ²

生态哥特式批评的早期兴起出现在乔纳森·贝特、莱斯利·费德勒和段义孚等学者的著作中，但这种批评方法在很大程度上是在 2000 年代中后期开始形成的。史黛西·阿莱莫（Stacy Alaimo）、杰弗里·杰罗姆·科恩（Jeffrey Jerome Cohen）、西蒙·C·埃斯托克（Simon C. Estok）、汤姆·J·希拉德（Tom J. Hillard）、蒂莫西·莫顿（Timothy Morton）、李·罗泽尔（Lee Rozelle）等批评家开始以不同方式将生态批评与哥特式文学联系起来，而哥特式文学模式在那时已经受到了影响。欣赏更多田园风光的自然作品。 Estok 2009 年的文章“在矛盾开放的空间中进行理论化：生态批评和生态恐惧症”被证明在将我们的注意力转向环境想象中更可怕的方面方面特别有影响力。埃斯托克将生态恐惧症定义为“对自然世界的非理性和毫无根据的仇恨”，他认为它“与同性恋恐惧症、种族主义和性别歧视一样存在于我们的日常生活和文学中，而且很微妙”。³在这个表述中，生态恐惧症的核心是人类为控制非人类世界而进行的斗争，以及当我们无法维持这种控制时所产生的恐惧和恐惧。在同年晚些时候的一篇文章中，汤姆·J·希拉德 (Tom J. Hillard) 在埃斯托克的思想的基础上，进一步奠定了基础，他认为，“因为哥特式文学如此痴迷于各种类型的恐惧，所以哥特式为理解这些恐惧的方式提供了一个有用的镜头”。许多作家——无论他们何时写作——都代表了对自然世界的恐惧和焦虑。” ⁴

在过去十年左右的时间里，批评家们一直致力于更准确地定义这种方法，这种方法后来被称为生态哥特式。安德鲁·史密斯 (Andrew Smith) 和威廉·休斯 (William Hughes) 在其 2013 年批评选集《生态哥特式》（EcoGothic）（第一本关于该主题的全书长度的研究）的介绍中写道：“哥特式...... 。 。在文学批评、生态批评理论和政治进程之间提供了一个具有文化意义的重要联系点。”在强调生态哥特式起源于浪漫主义的同时，史密斯和休斯认为，当代文本受到浪漫主义者无法想象的环境问题的影响，例如气候变化和“生态问题的政治紧迫性”。^{5 大卫·德尔·普林西比 (David Del Principe) 在 2014 年}《哥特式研究》特刊“漫长的十九世纪的生态哥特式”的介绍中写道，“生态哥特式表达了根深蒂固的偏见和日益严重的生态恐惧症——源于人类不稳定的环境的恐惧。与所有非人类的关系。” ⁶道恩·基特利和我在 2017 年批评选集《十九世纪美国文学中的生态哥特式》的介绍中写道，由于“生态批评致力于研究人类与非人类世界的文学和文化关系”，因此“采用了一种特殊的哥特式生态批评视角揭示了这些关系中经常弥漫的恐惧、焦虑和恐惧。” ⁷伊丽莎白·帕克 (Elizabeth Parker)在她 2020 年出版的《森林与生态哥特式》一书中写道，“生态哥特式是一种有风味的模式，通过它我们可以审视我们对非人类世界更黑暗、更复杂的文化表征——这些都是......