ABSTRACT
The progress of gothic criticism has taken a somewhat circuitous and scenic route from its own origins. Critical work on the gothic began with the painstaking recovery of the past by Edith Birkhead, Eino Railo, Michael Sadlier, and, especially, J. M. S. Tompkins and Montague Summers. 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. Freud’s concept of the ‘uncanny’, through which something once familiar becomes estranged, is often invoked to explain the gothic’s defamiliarisation of reality. The gothic has seemed relevant to attempts to theorise the relation between art, politics, history, and sexuality. The problem with choosing Goths as a model is that, like their descendent Frankenstein, they were, as Wren described them, ‘rather Destroyers than Builders’, and it is always easier to deconstruct than to reconstruct.
