Ecologies of the Undead: George Saunders’s Lincoln in the Bardo and the Limits of the Ecogothic

coGothic" is, as Elizabeth Parker has written, a "fledgling term." 1 Young as it is, it has already proven remarkably fruitful, in large part because it merges the open-endedness of ecocriticism with the ambiguities baked into gothic to describe an unsettling, elusive "ecocentric ambience" that has a long literary and cultural reach. 2 The ecogothic thus extends an American (and, as Parker argues, transnational) gothic that is itself capacious, "less a genre than a fluid, ubiquitous literary mode." 3 Ecogothic studies is off to a quick start, with a dedicated scholarly journal,