Immensely tall trunks of trees, gray, and leafless, rose up in endless succession as far as the eye could reach. Their roots were concealed in wide-spreading morasses .... And the strange trees seemed endowed with a human vitality, and waving to and fro their skeleton arms, were crying to the silent waters for mercy .... --Edgar Allan Poe, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket

This dream sequence from Edgar Allan Poe’s 1838 novella serves as just one of countless examples of what remains a relatively understudied element of American gothic fiction: the gothic plant. Given, however, the increased interest in ontological questions related to nonhuman Others, particularly animals, theorists have begun to address plants as something more than merely green scenery upon an otherwise human stage. With this interest in the implications of plants within the humanistic sphere, it is especially productive to consider the plants represented in one of America’s most popular literary modes, the gothic. And plants emerge repeatedly in American gothic literature, from its most obscure to its most canonical texts. For example, laboring to convey the stricken mind of his ill friend, the unnamed narrator of Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” remarks that, among a host of other peculiarities, Roderick Usher remained convinced “of the sentience of all vegetable things.”

Dissatisfied with what he viewed as the grotesque and morally corrupt content of much children's literature available at the time—which were mostly reprints of European titles—the New England printer Samuel Griswold Goodrich set out to compose and market books expressly intended for a young American readership. He began in 1819 by creating a handful of rather unsophisticated chapbooks intended to impart historical and moral lessons. In 1827, Goodrich published the first of his so-called Peter Parley books, which are narrated by a fictional grandfatherly Bostonian of that name. These books became extremely popular on both sides of the Atlantic, and they would serve as a powerful influence upon the minds of young Americans and upon the development of the nation's literary culture. As A.S.W. Rosenbach—in his formative study of early American children's literature— contends, the advent of Goodrich's Peter Parley series was "one of the most momentous and influential events in the history of American children's literature in the nineteenth century" (xlviii).

We could not have asked for a better theme for a James Fenimore Cooper conference than the one the organizers selected for this year—watersheds. Like the best conference themes, it invites timely papers devoted to specific topics while also allowing for scholarship that takes off in more unexpected directions. It's a rare example of strength in ambiguity, for even in its most literal sense, a watershed remains a relatively abstract, deceptively complex, concept. As the venerable Oxford English Dictionary contends, a watershed is merely "The line separating the waters flowing into different rivers or river basins; a narrow elevated tract of ground between two drainage areas." I like to think Cooper—whose works often incorporate lush descriptions of actual river systems, while also investigating the socio-political repercussions associated with invisible, and often arbitrary, "dividing lines"—would have approved of this theme as a point of entry into discussing the continued impact of his work, a project that becomes increasingly important as we move deeper into a twenty-first century marked by so much promise and so much more uncertainty.

In its broadest sense, the ecogothic is a literary mode at the intersection of environmental writing and the gothic, and it typically presupposes some kind of ecocritical lens. Indeed, in the only book devoted to the topic, Andrew Smith and William Hughes define ecogothic as “exploring gothic through ecocriticism,” demonstrating the virtual inextricability of the two concepts. Emergent in the 1990s, ecocriticism has devoted itself to studying the literary and cultural relationships of humans to the nonhuman world—to animals, plants, minerals, climate, and ecosystems. Adopting a specifically gothic ecocritical lens illuminates the fear, anxiety, and dread that often pervade those relationships: it orients us, in short, to the more disturbing and unsettling aspects of our interactions with nonhuman ecologies.

This article examines the way in which Laura , a short novel by Leonora Sansay published in 1809, associates the theme of the search for the founding happiness of the Young Republic to the dream, full of hope but doomed to failure, of conjugal bliss within a pastoral paradise. Sansay, in this little studied novel, uses the conventions of seduction novel and pastoral landscape around Philadelphia to question the validity of the social and physical boundaries that define a set of tensions between the human body and the natural world, and, finally, to question the possibility even for the young women of the nascent Republic to participate in the collective quest for happiness.

Surveying the development of the Southern Gothic landscape, Sivils locates its origins in seventeenth-century captivity narratives by figures such as Garcilaso de la Vega and Captain John Smith. He then traces the cultural evolution of the Southern Gothic landscape through a selection of texts by Henry Clay Lewis, Charles Chesnutt, William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor and others. Referencing critics such as María del Pilar Blanco and Yi-Fu Tuan—and placing emphasis upon the portrayal of the swamp as related to issues of racial oppression—Sivils ultimately argues that these landscapes function as much more than just passive settings. They are, rather, dynamic sites of haunting that reflect, and at times participate in, the South’s legacy of human and environmental abuse.