TOLKIEN AND THE GOTHIC
READING TOLKIEN’S WORK ANEW
Hot off the presses, the volume of proceedings “Tolkien and the Gothic” contains papers from the Tolkien Society Hybrid Seminar 2022, including an article by CAPAS member Michael Dunn. The volume seeks to shed light on what the words ‘Goth’ and ‘Gothic’ meant to J.R.R. Tolkien and the ways in which the various traditions associated with them proliferate his writing. From the linguistic to the literary, religious to the ecocritical, the proceedings explores how traditional and new theories in Gothic scholarship can help us read Tolkien’s work anew.
Dunn’s chapter “Tolkien’s Triptych: Ecological Uncanny, Double Dualism Personified, and the Language of the Literary Gothic” explores the extreme ambiguities of the various and varying ecological uncanny expanses in Tolkien’s work and suggests that Middle-earth establishes an ontology of Gothic which serves as inspiration for our current climate Zeitgeist. Tolkien’s ecological uncanny as well as extensive ambiguity towards mortality, immortality, peoples, places, and even language of Middle-earth, which itself is a cosmology of myth for our own distant past, are all the more important today than they ever have been as our interconnected and toxic planetary situation accelerates and at many forefronts of climate change entanglements to both landscape and environment become ever more interdependent.
The volume is edited by Will Sherwood, and published under the auspices of the Peter Roe Memorial Fund.
TOLKIEN AND THE GOTHIC, Publisher: Luna Press Publishing, Publication date: 26.03.2024, Paperback: 136 pages
ISBN: 978-1-915556-37-0#BOOK APOCALYPSE
