Introduction: The Proliferation of the Ecogothic

he ecogothic probes the dark and earthy unknowns of the literary landscape, upending creekside stones and dipping dirty fingernails into feculent poolsever 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,