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Series:   Elements in the Gothic

Coastal Gothic, 1719–2020

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 December 2025

Jimmy Packham
Jimmy Packham
Affiliation:
University of Birmingham

Summary

Littoral zones such as haunted shorelines, oppressively expansive beaches, and the crumbling edgelands around coastal cliffs have been an indelible feature of the Gothic literary tradition since the eighteenth century. They are frequently portrayed as strange, interstitial realms, sites of epistemic and existential precarity, of wreckage and uncanny returns, poised between the homely and unhomely, whose intense openness to the world(s) beyond contend uneasily (yet valuably) with the imagined integrity of selves and nations: it is a region, above all, of unsettlement. Coastal Gothic, 1719–2020 offers the first long-form examination of the coastal Gothic. Focusing on British and Irish Gothic authors and on the fraught political and human histories of the coastline, this Element examines the function of littoral terror, hauntings, and uncanny encounters as a means of unsettling pervasive conceptions of identity at national, regional, and individual levels.
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Keywords

the Gothiccoastsseasidehaunted shoresthe uncanny

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Series: Elements in the Gothic
Online ISBN: 9781009433730
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication: 22 January 2026

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Coastal Gothic, 1719–2020
  • Jimmy Packham, University of Birmingham
  • Online ISBN: 9781009433730
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Coastal Gothic, 1719–2020
  • Jimmy Packham, University of Birmingham
  • Online ISBN: 9781009433730
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Coastal Gothic, 1719–2020
  • Jimmy Packham, University of Birmingham
  • Online ISBN: 9781009433730
Available formats
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