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The Modern Gothic and Literary Doubles: Stevenson, Wilde and Wells by Linda Dryden (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), ISBN 1-403-90510-X, 220pp., £45.00 hb.
Gothic fiction's relationship with literary modernism and cultural modernity has been the subject of some excellent recent scholarship, not least a number of articles in Gothic Studies or Andrew Smith and Jeff Wallace's Gothic Modernisms (Palgrave Macmillan, 2002). Investigations of this new territory have not only laid bare the extent to which Gothic has been influential beyond its accepted stronghold on the fin de siècle but have also led to a reinvigoration of the debate over definition and categorisation. Consequently, contemporary scholarship in this area has had two related aims: first, to reveal the pervasiveness of the Gothic in modern literature and culture and thereafter to recalibrate what we presently consider Gothic to be. Linda Dryden's The Modern Gothic and Literary Doubles: Stevenson, Wilde and Wells appears at face value to fall clearly within this remit yet it requires only a cursory perusal of her chosen topics to realise that the book is of an altogether different type: the introductory synthesis of central Gothic tropes and texts.
To this end Dryden ably illustrates the critical consensus on Gothic fiction of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Organised into six chapters, three on the Gothicization of culture and society and one each on the work of Stevenson, Wilde and Wells, the book pivots on the notion of the double as both a fictional device and a social construction. Dryden's own conclusion articulates this position well:
The modern Gothic and the literature of duality in Stevenson, Wilde and Wells are more than fictional fantasies. At the fin de siècle Gothic representations of duality and horror are expressions of metropolitan anxieties springing from the lived experiences of the late-Victorian public. (188)
Dryden's arrival at such a conclusion comes first from a broad-based analysis of fin de siècle degeneracy, Gothic literary history, and the City of London, and then from detailed close readings of The Strange case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, The Picture of Dorian Gray and Wells' scientific romances.
These choices of text and context should make it clear that this is no venture into new arenas. Yet it is initially a surprise...