ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book examines how what could be termed the Gothic turn in criticism has favoured the uncovering of a continuity of preoccupations and anxieties that relate the modernist age to the nineteenth century. It suggests that a new literary meta-narrative of the Gothic is now at stake, one still influenced by a modernist versioning of the nineteenth century. The book offers new insights into Dickens's aesthetics while invalidating any teleological approach to literary studies. It focuses on Edwardian literature as the necessary bridge between the Victorians and the moderns. The book discusses the notion of the "Greek form" in Aesthetic art and focuses on some works by the Bloomsbury artists Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant in order to show that the circulation of "Greek" forms oversteps the notion of a divide.
