Contents -- Introduction -- I. FRAMING THE GOTHIC: THEORIES AND HISTORIES -- The Face of the Tenant: A Theory of American Gothic -- The Nurture of the Gothic, or How Can a Text Be Both Popular and Subversive? -- Dr. Frankenstein Meets Dr. Freud -- II. PSYCHOANALYSIS AND THE GOTHIC -- The Gothic Import of Faulkner's "Black Son" in Light in August -- On Stephen King's Phallus, or The Postmodern Gothic -- III. RACIAL POLITICS IN GOTHIC TEXTS -- Slavery and the Gothic Horror of Poe's "The Black Cat" -- Haunted by Jim Crow: Gothic Fictions by Hawthorne and Faulkner -- Looking into Black Skulls: American Gothic, the Revolutionary Theatre, and Arniri Baraka's Dutchman -- IV. GOTHIC CURRENTS IN WOMEN'S WRITING -- An Ecstasy of Apprehension: The Gothic Pleasures of Sentimental Fiction -- The Masochistic Pleasures of the Gothic: Paternal Incest in Alcott's "A Marble Woman" -- If a Building Is a Sentence, So Is a Body: Kathy Acker and the Postcolonial Gothic -- V. THE GOTHIC POSTMODERN -- Making Monsters, or Serializing Killers -- Some Stations of Suburban Gothic -- Notes on Contributors -- Index.