A Companion to the Gothic

A Companion to the Gothic, edited by David Punter (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2000), ISBN 0-631-23199-4, xix + 323pp., £19.99 pb.

As David Punter acknowledges in his introduction to the essay collection A Companion to the Gothic, there is no critical consensus as to 'what constitutes Gothic writing' (viii). Gothic is an historically delimited genre - or perhaps it is a genre that recurs throughout later modernity, reshaping itself to accommodate Enlightenment, Romantic, decadent, and postmodernist sensibilities. Gothic is a set of narrative conventions, of thematic preoccupations, of rhetorical strategies - though it is also known for the regularity with which it violates its own conventions. Or perhaps we recognize Gothic by the characteristic mood and atmosphere it generates, or by the devices it employs for disrupting normative realities, for the production of the uncanny.

The Gothic is rather like Mr Motley in China Miéville's recent masterwork of Gothic Science Fiction, Perdido Street Station. Mr Motley is an animate Arcimboldo painting, a disgusting amalgam of bits and pieces of incompatible species:

Scraps of skin and fur and feathers swung as he moved; tiny limbs clutched; eyes rolled from obscure niches; antlers and protrusions of bone jutted precariously; feelers twitched and mouths glistened . . . Scales gleamed. Fins quivered. Wings fluttered brokenly. Insect claws folded and unfolded. (42)

The artist commissioned to do Mr Motley's sculpture is transfixed with horror, but she cannot take her eyes off of him. The Gothic, too, is a composite, often a rather disgusting one, and yet this may be why we like it so much.

The twenty-four essays in this collection circle around this heteromorphic monster known as the Gothic and attempt to take its likeness, or at least to illuminate one aspect one tentacle, one hoof, one claw of the monster. Not surprisingly,...