In juxtaposing slave narratives and gothic novels, Winter does not erase difference; instead she provocatively details ‘the social ordering of power’ in ways that illuminate the boundaries of genre, race, and nation.

—Journal of American History

Carefully researched and well-documented, this fine study attempts to balance current political and theoretical sensibilities about feminism and race with the contemporary dilemmas of writers who confronted the oppression of women and the abuses of slavery.

—American Literature

Winter’s consideration of the conjunctions between British female gothic novels and American slave narratives offers a more dynamic model for understanding the cross-fertilizations between the gothic and slavery . . . By exploring instead of collapsing the boundaries between different locations and traditions of the gothic and by seeing the gothic as a constantly moving form with no fixed abode, we begin to trace its web of monstrous relations. As we move into new critical paradigms such as Greater Atlantic studies, we might well turn to the gothic to map the new world’s terrors as well as its complex encounters.

—American Literary History