ABSTRACT
The gothic is more appropriately described as a ‘mode’ of writing than a genre, with changing rather than fixed ideas about its defining textual characteristics. This flexibility has given rise, to newer versions of the mode, including feminist and post-feminist gothic, postcolonial gothic, ecogothic, gothic science fiction and Aboriginal gothic. The specifically Australian inflection of a gothic mode is evident in E. Wyld’s, Emily Maguire’s, Chi Vu’s and Ellen van Neerven’s texts, and each of them addresses Australia’s colonial past, often expressed through the trope of haunting. Maguire’s novel, shortlisted for the 2017 Miles Franklin Literary Award, poses the problem, in her own words, of ‘how to write about the glamorisation and fetishisation of violence against women without perpetuating exactly that’. In drawing both on a traditional Buddhist narrative and the Australian gothic, Vu’s intriguing story epitomises the impact of migrant and refugee writing on the canon of Australian literature that has been crucially important in its transformational capacity.
