On the Threshold of Gothic: A Reflection

David Punter's The Literature of Terror (1980) is a landmark in Gothic criticism. But, since then, much has changed. For a start, theory has come, and, to an extent, gone, but not without leaving its mark. If 'literary theory' is now less likely to be taught as a separate course in universities, that is because it is otherwise ubiquitous. Gothic, meanwhile, has moved from the critical margins to the mainstream. Faced with all that and having initiated the current conversation between the Gothic and theory, this major Gothic scholar here considers 'what are we on the threshold of now'. To what extent have the questions raised in 1980 been answered? And how satisfactorily? What remains elusive? And what have been the conversation's limitations? This concluding essay reflects less on the chapters that precede it and more on the changes in the theory-Gothic interplay that have been wrought since The Literature of Terror while also looking ahead to the likely directions of future work.

Unsettling Feminism: The Savagery of Gothic

Feminist criticism has tended to find in Gothic texts a model of its own master narrative, in which the female subject flees the house of patriarchy. This chapter proposes an alternative model for thinking through gender and the Gothic by returning to Ellen Moers' concept of the 'savagery of girlhood' (1977). The femininities constructed in Gothic texts are often barbaric in the sense of being abjected from the rational, orderly and proper body of feminism conceived as an enlightenment, humanist project. In this barbarism, Gothic offers a feminism that is characteristically unsettling and itself unsettled. Addressing a number of theoretical models from 'victim feminism' to posthumanism and drawing on texts from Wollstonecraft's Maria (1798) to Oyeyemi's White is for Witching (2009), this chapter reveals that it is in its difficulties and contradictions that Gothic has its greatest power to offer contemporary feminism.

The Gothic Body before and after Freud

This chapter reads Freud's relatively overlooked essay, "A Seventeenth-Century Demonological Neurosis" (1923), to consider how psychoanalysis received the Gothic trope of demoniacal possession and made of it an intra-psychic, rather than a religiously spiritual affair. The resulting analysis traces Freud's construction of the demoniacal from the Medieval-metaphysical to the empiricist psychological and then into the metapsychological, to consider how the demoniacal that Freud wanted to tame always exceeded his disciplining of it. By considering the historical slippage between "possession" and "obsession," this essay charts the rich but uneasy relation between demonism as an attack on the soul versus demonism as an attack on the body. It concludes by considering demonology in William Peter Blatty's The Exorcist and Ray Russell's The Case Against Satan, to emphasize the ways the post-Freudian Gothic cannot escape its medieval roots in bodily humiliation.

The Gothic at the Heart of Film and Film Theory

The main elements of the Freudian uncanny - re-animation of the dead, doubles, repetition compulsion, omnipotence of thought - can also be seen as a catalogue of the key techniques of cinema, the magical thinking on which the affective effect of cinema is predicated. So as explore the Gothic at the heart of cinema's theorization of its own epistemological, psychological and aesthetic concerns, this chapter begins with the flashback scenes in the TV series Mad Men. Montage (and especially superimpositions) perform the spectral haunting at issue, notably how the past overshadows and encroaches upon the present and how the distinction between material and psychic reality, body and mind comes to blur. Given that, like much current cinema, Mathew Weiner's show is a genre mix, the chapter finally moves back into cinema history to explore the Gothic at the heart of film in Alfred Hitchcock's unique splice between film noir and melodrama.

Dark Materialism: Gothic Objects, Commodities and Things

This chapter theorises the significance and effect of the strange objects and spectral Things populating Gothic fiction. It develops a novel and dual sense of materialism by combining Georges Bataille's 'base matter' with Karl Marx's account of commodity fetishism. The argument demonstrates how figures of horror both disclose the phantasmatic nature of bourgeois reality and give image and affect to the shadowy dominance of capital as a vampiric drive for surplus value. Things, from this perspective, display the interdependence of a reality determined by commodities, on the one hand, and fictions relishing spectres and monsters, on the other: the former's sense of what is real is defined in terms of, and against, the latter's palpable fictionality. That interdependence informs Alasdair Gray's novel Poor Things as it traces the complicity between a cruelly economic materialism preoccupied by profit and the dark fantasies promulgated throughout the Gothic canon.

The Gothic as a Theory of Symbolic Exchange

Inheriting longstanding norms that require reciprocation between the living and the dead, the Gothic interprets the cultural shifts of the late eighteenth century as a breach in such reciprocation, a breach that it hopes to address through its own account of symbolic exchange. In a wide range of scenarios - ghost tales, stories of sexual transgression, accounts of unborn and undead figures - it proposes that a body, a corpse, or a sexually active individual is inexplicable, out of place, haunting, until it receives the status of human being through a symbolic act. In some tales, it even provides counterfactual narratives of interchanges with supernatural figures - Satan, Dracula - to conceive of how symbolic exchange with the inhuman might cut across, replicate, or disturb human reciprocation. The Gothic thus attempts to redress the conditions of a certain modernity by calling upon -- and theorizing -- the fundamental imperatives of symbolic exchange.

Postcolonial Gothic in and as Theory

A number of cultural theorists and literary critics have identified the postcolonial as freighted with the legacies of colonialism. The Gothic has been invoked by some of these theorists to emphasize the effects of the colonial past in the postcolonial present. In some postcolonial fiction, the Gothic provides a framework or lens through which to analyse and discuss the postcolonial experience presented within that fiction. With others, however, the fictional text itself is the framework which interrogates and critiques the social, political and economic structures that shape the postcolonial experience. This chapter will consider the relationship between the Gothic and the postcolonial, as they inform and shape each other, with particular reference to the novels of the Australian writer, Mudrooroo, who in his Master of the Ghost Dreaming series (1991-2000) utilizes a range of literary and critical devices in order to excavate and foreground an Aboriginal voice.

The Gothic–Theory Conversation: An Introduction

This opening essay traces the persistent interplay between theory and the Gothic mode from the very beginning of the latter's rise in the eighteenth century. Then it proceeds to show how the Gothic and theory keep weaving into and out of each other, even as recently as the twenty-first century. That brief history sets up this volume's fundamental principle: that the Gothic and theory are so interactive in affecting and inspiring each other that many Gothic fictions are theoretical advances in aesthetics and culture just as much as certain kinds of theory are helpful in explaining the Gothic because they are already undercurrents in Gothic formations themselves. Finally, by providing concise definitions of the theoretical assumptions included here, this introduction sets up each of the following chapters as distinctive in revealing the Gothic-Theory interplay and how it has worked in particular cultural realms.

History/Genealogy/Gothic: Godwin, Scott and their Progeny

This essay argues that William Godwin's theory of historical romance may be placed in productive dialogue with Michel Foucault's influential preference for Nietzschean 'genealogy' over conventional history. For both, a narrative capable of unfolding the motive forces of history will necessarily be dispersed, contingent and fragmentary. This line of genealogical Gothic is traceable from Godwin through Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley in England, and through Charles Brockden Brown and Herman Melville in America. In genealogical Gothic, history is expressed as trauma, as an originating event that leads to haunting and repetition experienced by the sufferer as (to use Melville's term) 'tranced grief'. These narratives may be contrasted with Walter Scott's versions of the historical romance, which look to narrate some kind of historical resolution to the conflicts of the past. In this respect, genealogical Gothic relates to Scott as New Historicism does to grand narratives.

Gothic and the Question of Ethics: Otherness, Alterity, Violence

This chapter explores the affinities between the Gothic mode and Emmanuel Levinas's account of alterity, absolute otherness, responsibility and the ethics of the face-to-face encounter. Commencing with a theoretical discussion of Levinas's conceptualisation of the face of the Other, it proceeds to show how, in numerous Gothic fictions and films, the face serves as the site of absolute otherness. But if this implies a simple convergence between the Gothic and the ethics of Levinas's revisionist phenomenology, the chapter goes on to highlight how, in Gothic, the ethical encounter is seldom if ever unaccompanied by horror, terror, and unspeakable acts of violence that Levinas does not emphasize. It turns out, the argument concludes, that the Gothic already seems to have thought through the same problems, paradoxes and difficulties of Levinas's ethical encounter as those are theorised in Jacques Derrida's later work on the ethics of hospitality.