Table of Contents:
  • Introduction. Possessions: property and propriety in the English Gothic mode
  • Castle and moat: property possession in the English Gothic. Slippery properties: The castle of Otranto and The old English baron
  • A century of loss: historical contexts for property anxieties
  • Fantasies of return: property restoration imagined
  • Nineteenth-century expansions
  • Ghosts: possession of person in the English Gothic. Self-(dis)possession in The woman in white
  • Dispossessions of the mind and the body: a Gothic tropology
  • The double and the ghost: refusals of self-(dis)possession
  • Resurrection fantasies: defying death's dispossessions
  • Slavery and marriage: Gothic reflections of political rhetoric
  • Missing mothers and suppressed sisters: the dangers of primogeniture
  • Fragmented stories: appropriated voices: possession of the narrative in the English Gothic
  • Gothic conventions: narrative dispossessions
  • Contexts of contested narratives: can the text be possessed?
  • The theology of narrative dispossession in Maturin's Melmoth the wanderer
  • Dispossessed and dispossessing: the wandering Jew's possession of voice and narrative
  • Beyond the end: dispossessing closure. "'It is only the theory I want': repossessing fiction in Sarah Waters's Affinity
  • The political fantastic
  • Conclusion. Toward a transatlantic investigation: possession and dispossession in American Gothic literature.