Locating the Gothic in British Modernity

The late-Victorian era hasbeen extensively researched as a period of Gothic literature, and this studyseeks to build upon this body of work by connecting the content of such studiesto the early decades of the twentieth century, which are less often seen interms of Gothic or supernatural literature. Beginning with the quintessentially urbanGothic space of fin de siècle London, as represented in classic texts such as Dracula and Arthur Machen’s The Great God Pan, the study proceeds toask how the themes and energies which emerge in this moment evolve throughoutthe early twentieth century. In the ghost stories of authors like M.R. James,the Edwardian era witnesses an uncanny return to the rural English landscape,in which modernity encounters the re-emergence of suppressed fears and forces.After World War One, London again experiences a renewal of Gothic themes, withfigures such as D.H. Lawrence and T.S. Eliot representing the city as astricken and desolate space, haunted by the trauma and ghosts of the recentconflict. That legacy of violence and loss is also evident in rural representationsof place in the 1920s and 1930s, along with a renewed interest insupernaturalism and paganism found in authors like Sylvia Townsend Warner andMary Butts. Ultimately, this study argues, this period of dramatic social andcultural change is shadowed by a corresponding evolution in Gothic literaryrepresentation, whether that is expressed through modernist experimentation ormore conventional narrative forms.