ABSTRACT
This chapter reads Asylum (1996) and Port Mungo (2004) to suggest the centrality of passion to McGrath’s writing and, more specifically, to argue for the importance of modernist aesthetics and influences to mediating and locating these representations. There is still much to be said about the complex influences that modernism has on McGrath’s signature first-person narration and regarding the ways in which his fiction explores and critiques modernist concerns. As a starting point for further investigations, our argument makes the case that some of McGrath’s work can be understood as “gothic modernist:” that is, as drawing together modernist technique and concerns with images of gothic excess. Important intertexts for McGrath include first-person modes of narration drawn from modernism, for example from Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Solder: a Tale of Passion (1914), as well the “primtivist” turn to modernist aesthetics, evident in the writing of D. H. Lawrence, and in the post-Impressionist paintings of Paul Gauguin.
