Abstract
The legacy of the Gothic has extended well beyond the ramparts of Horace Walpole’s Castle (1764). Gothic landscapes haunt contemporary genres, from science fiction to horror, and from the historical novel to a presently popular incarnation of life writing: memoir. Memory is a Gothic haunting. The words of the memoirist creep silently inside the writer’s unconscious and are projected onto the shadowed walls of the blank page, enacting a puppet show replete with uncanny props and a recently unearthed, now un-dead, script. The human mind is a Gothic landscape, painted as an unsettled space where memory intermingles with history, and fact is perpetually contested and re-memorialized. Gothic geographies intersect with those of the memoir via haunted and haunting memories. To consider the memoir in a relationship with the Gothic is to call upon these spectral concepts.
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Moore, E. (2016). Haunting Memories: Gothic and Memoir. In: Yang, S., Healey, K. (eds) Gothic Landscapes. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-33165-2_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-33165-2_8
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