Soil and Superstition: Constructing the Gothic Self
Lawrence Buell’s essay “The Ecocritical Insurgency” (1999) claims that “human beings are inescapably biohistorical creatures who construct themselves, at least partially, through encounters with physical environments that they cannot not inhabit.” Precisely two centuries earlier, American writer Charles Brockden Brown advocates for a specifically American gothic tradition; Brown adapts the European gothic to American soil.