ABSTRACT
The gothic fantasy is particularly interesting from a psychoanalytic point of view, since it offers a number of insights into our simultaneous preoccupation with and avoidance of death. This chapter argues that the gothic offers an opportunity for us to explore negation in our "public" fantasies as well as our private ones. It differentiates the structure of gothic fantasies from science fiction and utopias and their alter egos, dystopias. Since they all deal with anxiety in one shape or another, there are many similarities between these fantasy genres, but also interesting differences. Before the advent of the novel and one of its early derivatives, the gothic tale, much storytelling in the western world centred on religious themes. The Canterbury Tales is united by the religious motif of the pilgrimage even if the contents of many of the tales are clearly secular, not to say bawdy.
