Ecogothic: ten years on

Published by Manchester University Press in 2013, Ecogothic opened a debate regarding the intimacy of ecology and horror that had for the most part been ignored by an academic ecocriticism more focused upon Romanticism than Gothic. The subsequent decade has moved the genre from the margins to the centre of ecocritical debate and, reciprocally, has prompted a reconsideration of the boundaries of what might be regarded as Gothic in terms of content, interpretation or implications. In this essay, the two original editors of Ecogothic review some of the developments associated with a decade that has introduced a provocative, polemic, and often overtly activist edge to academic ecocriticism. Acknowledging the presence of such crucial preoccupations as animal studies and plant studies, and embracing threatened terrains as expansive as the oceans or as intimate as the physiology of human airways, the authors contemplate the place which ecoGothic as a critical approach has come to occupy across the ten years that followed the publication of Ecogothic, the critical volume