Gothic and Modernism: Essaying Dark Literary Modernity (review)

Two of the most problematic and ubiquitous terms in the literary-critical lexicon are "Gothic" and "modernism." The former term is most commonly associated with a form of darkly themed sensational literature that cast shadows over the twilight of Enlightenment in late eighteenth-century Europe, originating in the popularity of novels by Horace Walpole, Anne Radcliffe and Matthew "Monk" Lewis, to name only a few. The latter term—although still widely debated—is generally used to refer to several loosely associated literary movements that sprung up, primarily in Western Europe and the United States, between 1890 and 1940, and it is generally associated with the work of T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf, among others. In Gothic and Modernism: Essaying Dark Literary Modernity, John Paul Riquelme provides a collection of critical essays that builds on the growing interest in the relationships between the Gothic and modernism while subsequently expanding the discourse into promising new directions.

In his introductory essay, Riquelme observes that "[t]he lineaments of a yet-to-be-written history of the modern Gothic begin to emerge in the essays published here" (2008, 5). This collection marks an effort to map the dissemination of Gothic concepts in the modern age. The book is divided into four parts beginning with three essays on canonical authors that locate the origins of "the modern Gothic" in the 1890s. At first glance the Gothic and Modernism may seem to be strange bedfellows, but Riquelme argues that "[t]he essentially anti-realistic character of Gothic writing from the beginning creates in advance a compatibility with modernist writing. That compatibility begins to take a visible, merged form in the 1890s in Britain" (4). Although originating in the late eighteenth-century, Gothic themes such as doubling, the haunting of the present by the past, the play of light and shadow, and the discourses of hierarchical power structures continued to influence the writing of influential fin-de-siecle authors. Oriented by the 1890s as the decade of confluence between the Gothic and the Modern, Riquelme's collection traces the evolution of the modern Gothic beyond its nineteenth-century origins, charting its "interactions with national literatures and political events outside England" (4).

Reading Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891) "[a]s a Gothic revisionary interpretation of Pater's late Romanticism," Riquelme argues that Wilde's literary chiaroscuro and his utilization of the Gothic convention of doubling reveals the darker side of Pater's aesthetic ideas, creating a more complex, multifaceted portrait of the artist. The Picture of Dorian Gray provides the touchstone for mapping out the history of the modern Gothic as Riquelme notes that "this particular instance of excess marks a turning point in literary history toward literary modernism" (26). This is followed by an outstanding essay by Joseph Valente on Bram Stoker in which he examines Stoker's use of Gothic duality as a means of projecting the anxiety of his own in-between position as "a member of a conquering and a vanquished race, a ruling and a subject people, [and] an imperial and an occupied nation" (47). In the next essay, Patrick O'Malley isolates the primary motif of the Gothic as the uncanny eruption of the past into the present and he provides an interesting reading of Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure (1895)—a work not traditionally thought of as Gothic—as the last nail in the coffin of the Gothic proper by making the thrill of what was once exotic familiar. "If Austen's Northranger Abbey rejected the Gothic because it was too foreign to English experience," writes O'Malley, "Jude destroys it because it has become too familiar" (75).

With our critical compasses calibrated, Riquleme, in Part Two, collects essays that trace the spread of Gothic elements into popular American forms, such as the western, detective fiction, and ultimately the postmodern reflexivity of the slasher genre. This collection is at its most interesting when it follows...