The Twentieth Century (1900–75): Modernist Spiritualism and Political Gothic

Abstract

This chapter begins by concentrating on the spiritualist movement of the early-twentieth century, especially the ‘folletín’ (penny dreadful) occult-spiritualist hybrids of Emilio Carrère, as an example of the modern Gothic. Carrère’s writing, popular but on the critical periphery, experimented with content and violence in innovative ways. Naturally, the outbreak of the Civil War in 1936 affected writing of all kinds, but Alfonso Sastre, whose Lugubrious Nights (1964) I study here, was very socially committed. His book also includes an interesting preface in which the author attempts to explain the appeal of horror writing. In the second half of this chapter, I focus on what Sastre sees as the radical potential of a dialectic of the imagination, as well as his rethinking of the Gothic.