Dark Modernisms

Abstract

This chapter argues that there is a modernist gothic body of writing and that several important modernist contributors made new the aesthetics of terror and horror by establishing distinctly modernist motifs of transgression and haunting in their fiction and art. Yet, this “modern” remaking of the Romantic or Victorian Gothic should not be read as the modernist artist merely transcending the old. Instead, the modernist reworking of terror connects to two key psychological contexts that are already emerging by the late nineteenth century: the birth of the unconscious (in culture) and the turn towards an aesthetics of interiority in writing. In making its case, my argument includes readings of Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, surrealism, and German Expressionism.