ABSTRACT
In nineteenth-century literature, the Gothic's two-way transatlantic exportation shows the genre undergoing newly defining innovations that hinge on such reconfigurations. Cultural clichs both of the Old World in America and of the New World as an extended Wild West in British fiction are redeployed and, in different contexts, re-viewed or 'refracted'. The representation of transatlantic Gothic forms in nineteenth-century British fiction can shed a revealingly different light on larger transoceanic cultural exchanges. The Gothic's exportation across the Atlantic enriched British fiction in a number of culturally revealing ways that were instrumental in shaping new genre paradigms. Critical reactions to American literary developments included the importation and re-slanting of Wild West images as well as a self-conscious refraction that could comprise. The Gothic was more than merely an important part, or key factor, in these developments. Gothic writing was being produced as well as consumed in the New World; the Old World was differently represented in these transatlantic narratives.
