ABSTRACT
Gothic is sometimes positioned as a kind of counter-narrative to the major highcultural movements of the twentieth century: a principally popular form, the stuff of cult readership and mass-market paperbacks, its sensationalism at odds with the serious, avant-garde experimentalism of modernism and postmodernism. The common-sense view is that modernism, in its emphasis on the contemporary world and high value on accurately recreating interior consciousness, was inimical to Gothic and that therefore in the first half of the twentieth century the genre was in decline. Postmodernism, on the other hand, with its embrace of genre fiction, pastiche, sensationalism and spectacle, provided a much more sympathetic climate for Gothic’s revival. Yet both modernist and postmodernist texts have a rich and complex relationship with Gothic, one that goes beyond straightforward rejection or exploitation as a ‘popular’ genre. Modernism and postmodernism both took a variety of different forms, often contradictory, and cannot be reduced to a single formula: neither, then, can their relationship with Gothic.
