While the white American Gothic novel must be understood as a highly racialized and structural anti-Black text, Black authors have creatively deconstructed the Gothic since the 18th century.

The American Gothic novel has been deeply shaped by issues of race and raciality from its origins in British Romanticism to the American Gothic novel in the twenty-first century. Savage Horrors delineates an intrinsic raciality that is discursively sedimented in the Gothic's uniquely binary structure. Corinna Lenhardt uncovers the destructive and lasting impact of the Gothic's anti-Black racism on the cultural discourses in the United States. At the same time, Savage Horrors traces the unflinching Black resistance back to the Gothic's intrinsic raciality. The African American Gothic, however, does not originate there but in the Black Atlantic roughly a decade before the first Gothic novel was ever written on American soil.

Autorentext
Corinna Lenhardt, born 1982, received her PhD in American studies from Universität Münster, Germany. Her research and teaching interests include African American and ethnic studies, race, gender, and popular culture. Her book »Savage Horrors« was awarded the Dissertationspreis 2020/2021 der Gesellschaft fur Fantastikforschung e.V.