The Modern Gothic

Abstract

Gothic fiction is often a literature of transformations where identity is unstable and sanity a debatable state of being. The Gothic of the fin de siècle itself underwent something of a transformation. Located in the historically remote past or in isolated, wild locations amid the suggestive relics of an ancient past, the traditional Gothic was a fiction about history and about geography.¹ Yet, at the end of the nineteenth century, a new Gothic mode emerged, a modern Gothic, whose narratives focused on the urban present, refracting contemporary concerns through the lens of a literature of terror. As such, Kelly Hurley argues that the ‘fin de siècle Gothic rematerializes as a genre in many ways unrecognizable, transfigured, bespeaking an altered sensibility that resonates more closely with contemporary horrific representations than those generated at the far edge of the Enlightenment’ (Hurley, 4). It was a Gothic form that anticipated the twentieth century, and anticipated some of the darker moments that were witnessed as the new century unfolded.

The City is of Night, but not of Sleep;

There sweet sleep is not for the weary brain;

The pitiless hours like years and ages creep,

A night seems termless hell.

James Thomson, ‘The City of Dreadful Night’ (1874).