ABSTRACT
Recent scholarship on the Gothic testifies to the emergence of new versionings of the genre’s literary history: the connections between the Gothic and the twentieth century are no longer overlooked, and with their uncovering, the complexity of the narrative arc between the Victorians and the modernists can be emphasized anew. Using a meta-critical approach, this chapter examines the recent scholarship on Victorian and modernist Gothic and how it questions the myth of rupture between the nineteenth and the twentieth century by taking us beyond long-accepted oppositional paradigms while proposing new versions of the Gothic’s literary history. It first unveils a continuity of cultural preoccupations and anxieties that sheds light on the important role of the Gothic in the transition from the Victorians to the modernists; it then questions the theoretical and historiographical presuppositions that these new narratives explicitly or implicitly offer. It finally suggests that the recent approaches to transmutations of the Gothic across the centuries testify to what David Glover calls the “unavailability of a definitive break with what has gone before.”
