ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to investigate the transmission of the idea of nation in a selection of texts that employ defining aspects of the monstrous body and the Gothic idiom. It argues that engagements with the Goth or Gothic in the early-modern and postmodern period reveal a dialectic of the civilized and the barbarous. It outlines the creative and critical transformation of traumatic ideology into a transitory state of play: the cultural moment that is caught inside the interaction and between the binary oppositions of Gothic/classical, rude/polished, barbarous/civilized. The chapter also outlines the multiple and complex trajectories for the production and reception of caricature that modernity and postmodernity have inherited and shows that they are human "remains". It discusses that fluid subjectivity and monstrous nationhood are evident in earlier texts. The chapter focuses on the inter-relationships between the text and the body, and the text and the image, and their mapping onto ideas of the monstrous nation and the transnational empire.
