Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction Neo-Gothicism: Persistent Haunting of the Past and Horrors Anew
- Chapter One “Through a glass darkly”: The Gothic Trace
- Chapter Two Dark Descen(den)ts: Neo-Gothic Monstrosity and the Women of Frankenstein
- Chapter Three Theorising Race, Slavery and the New Imperial Gothic in Neo-Victorian Returns to Wuthering Heights
- Chapter Four Toxic Neo-Gothic Masculinity: Mr. Hyde, Tyler Durden and Donald J. Trump as Angry White men
- Chapter Five Shadows of the Vampire: Neo-Gothicism in Dracula, Ripper Street and What We Do in the Shadows
- Chapter Six “Here we are, again!”: Neo-Gothic Narratives of Textual Haunting, from Peter Ackroyd’s Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem to The Limehouse Golem
- Chapter Seven Spectral Females, Spectral Males: Coloniality and Gender in Neo-Gothic Australian novels
- Chapter Eight “We Are all humans”: Self-Aware Zombies and Neo-Gothic Posthumanism
- Chapter Nine Neo-Gothic Dinosaurs and the Haunting of History
- Chapter Ten Doctor Who’s Shaken Faith in Science: Mistrusting Science from the Gothic to the Neo-Gothic
- Chapter Eleven The Devil’s in It: The Bible as Gothic
- Notes on Contributors
- Index
Chapter Seven - Spectral Females, Spectral Males: Coloniality and Gender in Neo-Gothic Australian novels
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 February 2022
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction Neo-Gothicism: Persistent Haunting of the Past and Horrors Anew
- Chapter One “Through a glass darkly”: The Gothic Trace
- Chapter Two Dark Descen(den)ts: Neo-Gothic Monstrosity and the Women of Frankenstein
- Chapter Three Theorising Race, Slavery and the New Imperial Gothic in Neo-Victorian Returns to Wuthering Heights
- Chapter Four Toxic Neo-Gothic Masculinity: Mr. Hyde, Tyler Durden and Donald J. Trump as Angry White men
- Chapter Five Shadows of the Vampire: Neo-Gothicism in Dracula, Ripper Street and What We Do in the Shadows
- Chapter Six “Here we are, again!”: Neo-Gothic Narratives of Textual Haunting, from Peter Ackroyd’s Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem to The Limehouse Golem
- Chapter Seven Spectral Females, Spectral Males: Coloniality and Gender in Neo-Gothic Australian novels
- Chapter Eight “We Are all humans”: Self-Aware Zombies and Neo-Gothic Posthumanism
- Chapter Nine Neo-Gothic Dinosaurs and the Haunting of History
- Chapter Ten Doctor Who’s Shaken Faith in Science: Mistrusting Science from the Gothic to the Neo-Gothic
- Chapter Eleven The Devil’s in It: The Bible as Gothic
- Notes on Contributors
- Index
Summary
The Gothic is an Ur-mode in Australian literature for several reasons: It was popular historically in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries during which colonisation took place and white-Australian culture took root in the colonies (Turcotte 1998; Gelder 2012, 381); “Australian National Identity,” consolidated at the moment of federation of the colonies in 1901, took its literary form in what is known as 1890s Realism, a realism heavily saturated with the Gothic; and finally but perhaps most significantly, the cultural psyche of the nation is built upon the repression—and its return—of the horrors of violence on the colonial frontiers—eeriness and brutality of all kinds, including rape, murder and massacres of Aboriginal people. This psyche is insistently expressed in the literature of the nation; in both high and popular forms (Weaver 2009), Australian literature is and always has been awash with Gothic terror, grotesquerie, secrets and hauntings.
It is in this context that the present chapter makes a claim for a neo-Gothic zeitgeist in Australian literature, in which fundamental tropes of the Female Gothic are recast in a twenty-first century light (or, perhaps better, darkness). Three novels, two of them multiple award-winners—The Night Guest by Fiona McFarlane (2013) and The Swan Book by Alexis Wright (2013)—and one an overlooked novel by an author whose other works are also acclaimed, The Engagement, by Chloe Hooper (2016 [2012]), are three works that deploy in updated form some classic Female Gothic conventions. In their revisions, or repressions, to the classic Gothic tropes of the haunted house, the menacing male, criminal plotting and intrigue in relation to money and property, and doubles/doppelgängers and ghostly figures, these novels reflect contemporary social and cultural concerns of race and gender in both Australia and global modernity more broadly.
The spectrality central to the Gothic form aligns in these novels with the spectralising operations of contemporary globalised modernity. Perpetuating the capitalist-colonial structures that have always worked to the benefit of the white male subject, these ghosting forces of globalisation overcome the individual men in these novels but continue to secure their hierarchical power at the top of the structure of privilege.
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- Neo-Gothic NarrativesIllusory Allusions from the Past, pp. 109 - 124Publisher: Anthem PressPrint publication year: 2020