Gothic has a long history of fascination with nature, both in a secondary sense as ‘a powerfully unruly background’ that functions as a backdrop to human violence (Calder Williams 2011, 32), and in a primary sense, as itself the agent of violence on which terrifying plots turn. Tom Hillard, one of the first critics to delineate ‘ecogothic’ as a distinct subgenre, has compellingly argued that US literary gothic, for instance, has a long tradition of ‘representations of nature inflected with fear, horror, loathing or disgust’ (2009, 685), radiating out through the work of William Bradford, Charles Brockden Brown or Edgar Allan Poe, and ineluctably bound up with the racialised imaginaries of environments emerging from settler colonialism, frontierism, slavery, plantation and war, whose legacies continue to haunt the present. As such, ecogothic has different political valences: it can function in a primarily ‘eco-phobic’ manner, to register fears of morethan- human nature, often encapsulated in ‘revenge of nature’ narratives that imagine biophysical forces, flora or creatures of the natural world as striking ‘back against humans as punishment for environmental disruption’ (Rust and Soles 2014, 509), or in tropes that highlight alterity or material excess, anxiously imagining the threats posed by ‘the uncanny sentience or animation of nonhuman nature and the absorption of human characters into an unbounded natural world’ (Sencindiver 2018, 489).

However, ecogothic can also function critically, exposing the socio-ecological crises produced by the capitalist organisation of nature, and retooling the ‘revenge’ trope to imagine environments that revolt against capitalist forms of extraction, enclosure and pollution. In such narratives, the insurgency of more-than-human nature becomes a vehicle for sympathetic identification or catharsis, ‘the insurrectionary prospect of the background coming monstrously into its denied prominence’ (Calder Williams 2011, 33). Disgust is elicited not by nature and its imagined difference from humanity, but rather by the repulsive violence immanent to the socio-ecological regimes of the ‘capitalist world-ecology’ which treats nature as ‘cheap’ or valueless (Moore 2015), except to the extent that it can be commodified and transformed into an object of exchange.

In this chapter, I further refine the category of the ecogothic to delineate a subset that I call ‘Extractive Gothic’, ecogothic narratives set in contexts of extractivism that can operate through either extractivist or anti-extractivist aesthetics.