ABSTRACT
The domain of the gothic encompasses what is ancient and what is terrifying. And so gothic works also inevitably concern what is modern and what is reassuring, although without necessarily portraying the modern as reassuring. To the contrary, the gothic can unsettle not just fictional pasts, but facts supposed to hold for the present and future. Many gothic works rattle the iron cage of modernity with fears and desires, and this, in part, is why establishment critics have so persistently dismissed the genre as backward, even degenerate. Still, the gothic’s seemingly extravagant emotions often relate in complex and diverse ways to movements intrinsic to the social body. Accordingly, literary histories that treat how gothic novels engage with modern institutions-from the domestic household, to the imagined community of the nation, to fiction’s own stylistic and textual conventions-have shown how the gothic rearticulates ethical and aesthetic styles integral to an evolving structure of feeling.1 They have even shown how some gothic works bypass the normative modern dynamic of progression and retrogression to reflect on the disjunctive temporality that underlies that dynamic: a temporality of which “romance” and “modernity” can name either the parts or the whole.
