ABSTRACT
The progress of gothic criticism in this century, however, has taken a somewhat circuitous and scenic route from its own origins. While later critics have been enormously indebted to Summers, they have also been generally intensely irritated by his pomposity. Like the gothic servant, he is often long-winded and rambling. Ironically, too, the method he denounced was partially largely responsible for the gothic’s modern gain in prestige. Freud’s concept of the ‘uncanny’, through which something once familiar becomes estranged from us, is often invoked to explain the gothic’s defamiliarisation of reality. The study of the gothic has increased as part of critical interrogations of the authority of the canon, reflecting further the recent focus on literature as a product of social forces, and on its relationship particularly to issues of class and gender. The gothic has seemed relevant to attempts to theorise the relation between art, politics, history, and sexuality.
