This chapter examines the phenomenon of Nordic troll Gothic. It demonstrates how late twentieth and twenty-first century troll fiction can be understood in relation to the concepts of ecogothic and dark ecology, and how the ambiguous character of the troll is used to explore limits and question categories. Nature, especially the forest, is depicted as dark and uncanny and it is sometimes also described as having agency, dissolving the limits between animate and inanimate. The chapter analyses troll stories by Swedish authors Selma Lagerlöf, Kerstin Ekman and Stefan Spjut, and Finnish author Johanna Sinisalo, showing how they make use of both the folklore tradition and the Gothic. The chapter demonstrates, among other things, that the plot is rarely narrated from the point of view of the troll, and that trolls often are depicted as a dying species but also as dark avengers, striking back at humankind.

This chapter introduces and defines the concept of ‘Nordic Gothic’ as fiction produced in the five nation states of Iceland, Denmark, Sweden, Norway and Finland, and in the regions claimed by these nations. The chapter observes that the geographical and linguistic borders that these states denote have changed greatly during the past 200 years, and that this has been important to the rise of Gothic. The introduction furthermore notes that, since the 1990s, there has been a significant Gothic boom across several media in the Nordic region. It is argued that this boom needs to be understood both in its relation to other regional contexts and in relation to the concept of Nordic Noir. Finally, the introduction describes some of the work that has been done on Nordic Gothic and provides the reader with an outline of the chapters that follow.

The argument of this book follows two main themes: the first has to do with periodicity; the second with politics, especially as a framework within which to view seventeenth-century literature. This chapter maps the disciplinary paradigms which have long produced a view of the seventeenth century saturated by high-definition contrasts: between the earlier and later Stuart periods, but also between factions and ideologies. It then asks what it would look like to write the history of seventeenth-century literature anew, to tell a story about imaginative and polemical writing in this age that remained open to accident and unevenness, to contradiction and uncertainty. Giving illustrative consideration to John Dryden, Andrew Marvell, and John Milton, the chapter begins to suggest some new ways of conceiving how these writers might relate to one other and to the politics and aesthetics of a long seventeenth century.

Since its release in 2008 as a Young Adult (YA) text, Tender Morsels has been subject to widespread praise and censure. In reviews and reading groups it has been criticised by adults (including educators), as well its target audience of fourteen plus readers, for containing circumstances too challenging and traumatic for young readers; and with incestuous sexual abuse and gang rape in the first few pages it is easy to see why that has been the case. By juxtaposing the dominant psychoanalytic theories of literary criticism, with the fairytale retellings by feminist authors from the 1970s to the present time, as well as key second wave feminist texts like Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (1949) and Susan Brownmiller’s Against Our Will (1975), this novel can be seen to not only challenge the prevalence of a ‘real’ feminism in our literary criticism, but also in the Western world at large.

The book’s Part II begins by exploring conversations with antiquity made possible by different kinds of parallel Latin and vernacular composition in early modern poetry. Some of Andrew Marvell’s verse is in Latin, and of particular interest are instances in which Marvell writes Latin and English versions of the same poem: thus Hortus and the more famous Garden read as cross-referential poems that play with, and thematize, the writer’s dual literary competence in English and in Latin. This kind of ‘diptych’ composition is rendered more fully tangible in John Milton’s 1645 double book Poems, both English and Latin, ahead in Chapter 5. However, the midsection of Chapter 4 takes the idea of the cross-linguistic diptych in a different and hypothetical direction: what if one were to imagine a Latin ‘twin’ for every vernacular poem steeped in classical tradition, even in the 99 per cent of cases in which no such twin exists? Such a thought experiment finds special traction in the case of Milton’s Paradise Lost, with an added twist in that early translators were not lacking who actually rendered the Latinate and Virgilian verse of Paradise Lost into post-Virgilian Latin.

In evaluating the interplay of biological and social interpretations of the incest taboo, most literary commentaries have used fiction to show how notions of incest have changed historically through the variable of culture; in these accounts, the biological body remains a constant, whilst society adapts its parameters for what counts as incest. However, science fiction introduces material embodiment itself as a variable, as it hypothesises bodies that can be altered (e.g. through genetics) or even eliminated (e.g. through virtualising the mind via a computer). Through comparing three science fiction novels, this chapter evaluates whether such changing types of embodiment will also change the way in which society approaches the incest taboo, or even remove it entirely.