Imperial Gothic

Course on the development of contemporary genre from the Gothic to Science Fiction and Fantasy, concluding with the appearance of the New Weird and the post-New Weird moment. 

This course will begin from the premise of Brian Aldiss' seminal critical works Billion Year Spree and Trillion Year Spree that we can trace a direct line of descent from the Gothic fictions of the eighteenth century into the Science Fiction and Fantasy of the twentieth by beginning with Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. It will encourage students to engage with the stylistic and conceptual content of the Gothic through extracts from key Gothic texts, and move forward to show how this informs the development of what become the tap-root texts of the Science Fiction and Fantasy canons. The texts under consideration will take us from the early 1800s to the contemporary moment, to undertake contextual exploration of historical genres and examine what they mean to us today. They will also help us to understand how contemporary writers employ diverse of the stylistic and conceptual elements of the forms Gothic, Science Fiction and Fantasy to new political and aesthetic ends in the contemporary world, through humour, irony and the transformation of earlier formulations of the fantastic such as the Weird.

Building on Patrick Brantlinger's description of imperial Gothic fiction as "that blend of adventure story with Gothic elements", this article compares the narrative formula of adventure fiction to two tales of haunting produced in a colonial context: Rudyard Kipling's "The Mark of the Beast" (1890) and Arthur Conan Doyle's "The Brown Hand" (1899). My central argument is that these stories form an antithesis to adventure fiction: while adventure stories reaffirm the belief in the imperial mission and the racial superiority of the British through the display of hypermasculine heroes, Kipling's and Conan Doyle's Gothic tales establish connections between imperial decline and masculine failure. In doing so, they destabilise the binary construction between civilised Western self and savage Eastern Other and thus anticipate one of the major concerns of postcolonial criticism. This article proposes, therefore, that it is useful to examine ...