Book Review: Sarah Gilbreath Ford, Haunted Property: Slavery and the Gothic (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2020

Abstract

Sarah Gilbreath Ford’s Haunted Property: Slavery and the Gothic offers a richly nuanced and timely examination of how southern Gothic literature functions as a mechanism by which authors have interrogated the deep relationship between the American Dream of fulfillment through property and the horrors of slavery. Across its five chapters, the book focusses on a selection of influential, or otherwise instructive, southern texts that span from the mid-nineteenth to the early twentyfirst centuries. Much of the book’s strength resides in how well it teases out instructive commonalities between texts while inviting interpretive leaps that span the landscape of southern literature.