Afterword: On Exhuming an Early American Ecogothic

"Yet one day the demons of America must be placated, the ghosts must be appeased, the Spirit of Place atoned for. Then the true passionate love for American Soil will appear. As yet, there is too much menace in the landscape."

—D. H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature (1923)

In the early 2000s, back when I was a doctoral student at the University of Arizona, tinkering with ideas that I then thought of as "dark nature" or "gothic nature," I could scarcely have imagined, twenty years later, the publication of this special issue of Studies in American Fiction. The thought of such a range of scholars, from around the world, contributing their ideas to the flourishing field of the "ecogothic" was beyond anything that I could have dreamed. Back then, ecocriticism itself was still something of an emerging field, and one by no means yet widely embraced by the academy—so in those early explorations of the shadowy corners of ecocriticism and gothic literature, which itself had long been a marginalized area of study, my work then often felt fairly far afield.