The long nineteenth century was a period marked by industrial revolution, scattered religious beliefs and technological advancements. The Gothic tradition recorded these significant changes through a language of monstrosity, excess, and horror as the Industrial Revolution gained momentum, coal and steam power expanded, and as soon as the British Empire increased its extractive demands on colonized ecologies and laboring bodies. This edited volume proposes a new way of looking at Gothic figures such as vampires, parasites, doubles, and consuming machines in order to examine how such tropes adumbrated the anxieties, ethics, and violences of environmental extraction.

By focusing on the recent developments in Ecogothic Studies, Energy Humanities and Political Ecology, this book seeks to unify environmental and Gothic criticism under a shared methodological concern: how to read figurative horror as a form of ecological and economic testimony. In contrast to views that position the Gothic merely as a sensational or psychological genre, we intend to argue that the Gothic acts as an environmental sensorium. From mines and plantations to factory towns and fossil-fuelled empires, the Gothic provides a symbolic apparatus for narrating the uncanny afterlives of imperial and industrial accumulation.

In Dracula (1897) Bram Stoker uses the vampire character, who parasitically feeds on the blood of others, accumulates estates, and effortlessly traverses national borders, to encapsulate worries of degeneracy and reverse colonization. This reflects the logic of capital and empire. Similar to this, Sheridan Le Fanu's Carmilla (1872) evokes both sexual deviance and environmental depression while conjuring vampirism inside a deteriorating Central European landscape. In addition to these classic works, issues of resource depletion, environmental contagion, and poisonous embodiment are commonly depicted through Gothic aesthetics in penny dreadfuls, urban Gothic tales, and imperial romances. As a result, the vampire, parasite, and haunted machine are transformed from merely terrifying characters into symbolic representations of structural problems with food, energy, land, and body sovereignty.

This volume aims to provide a methodologically cohesive framework by integrating literary analysis with Environmental history, Extractive Ecologies and Energy Studies. It is based on decolonial ecologies (which emphasize the imperial geographies of resource accumulation), figurative materialism (which attends to the symbolic representation of extractive practices), and ecological formalism (which examines how literary forms encode ecological processes). The way the Gothic mediates entanglements between the human and non-human, the organic and the mechanical, the animate and the exhausted - forms of entanglement that reflect the dissolution of ecological limits brought about by extractive capitalism - is of particular interest to us.

In doing so, this collection expands upon the research of a number of academics, including Frédéric Neyrat, Stephanie LeMenager, Elizabeth DeLoughrey, Andrew Smith, and Monica Germanà. In order to place Gothic motifs within larger global-material fluxes, we also take inspiration from Elaine Freedgood's object theory, Jason Moore's world-ecology approach, and Michael Tondre's energy-conscious interpretation of the Victorian novel. From a methodological standpoint, this book will try to connect the symbolic and the systemic, the supernatural and the infrastructure, and the creative and the material. We are looking for original essays that examine how ecological exploitation and Gothic aesthetics came together over the protracted nineteenth century. Chapters may concentrate on both canonical or little-studied works, and they should ideally use interdisciplinary approaches that draw from historical materialism, environmental studies, and energy humanities.

Themes and Subcategories:

• Vampires and the Metaphor of Resource Drain
• Parasites and Colonial Consumption
• Gothic Doubles and the Political Ecology of Self and Other
• Haunted Landscapes: Mines, Plantations, and Factories
• Energy Transitions and Gothic Temporalities (coal, steam, fossil capital)
• Contagion, Epidemics, and Toxic Bodies in Industrial Gothic
• Gendered and Racialised Ecologies of Gothic Horror
• Ghosts of Labour: Industrial Hauntings and Spectral Workforces
• Gothic Real Estate: Land Ownership, Capital Accumulation, and Blood
• Cannibalism and Capital: The Political Economy of Monstrous Consumption
• The Supernatural in Victorian Eco-Spiritualism and Occult Ecology
• Postcolonial Gothic and the Environmental Imagination

Submission Guidelines

- Abstract Submission: Please submit an abstract of no more than 300 words outlining the proposed chapter's main arguments and contributions with keywords and a short bio note to the following address email id: extractivegothic@gmail.com

- Full Chapter Submission: Complete chapters should be between 6,000 to 7,000 words

- Abstract Submission Deadline: 15 of December 2025. (Expected publication : 2026-2027) 

- Formatting : MLA 9

NOTE: We have strong interest from Bloomsbury

(For any inquiries or further information, feel free to contact the editors at the same email address: extractivegothic@gmail.com)

Editors:

Christian Wilken

Lecturer

University of Düsseldorf

Ritam Dutta

PhD Scholar

Jadavpur University

Indranil Banerjee

PhD Scholar

Jadavpur University