Gothic Origins: The Haunting of the Text

Abstract

To begin with what may appear a bold statement: in the context of the modern, Gothic is the paradigm of all fiction, all textuality We have been used to such claims down the ages; they used to arise from, for instance, the drive of a national literature to discover in textuality something of ‘essence’ which could be rhetorically vaunted; more recently, we have seen romantic claims for the fragment, postmodern claims for the narrative of self-consciousness.

— Dreams, a certain guard said — were never designd so to re-arrange an empire.¹