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Gothic-postmodernism: Voicing the Terrors of Postmodernity by Maria Beville (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2009), 220pp, euro44 pb; ISBN 978-9042026643
The overlap that exists between Gothic and postmodern and/or contemporary culture have been the subject of interdisciplinary debates across a range of discourses pertinent to the literary and aesthetic production of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Significant contributions to such debates have emerged in Catherine Spooner's Contemporary Gothic (Reaktion, 2006), Fred Botting's Gothic Romanced (Routledge, 2008), beside other shorter studies, not to mention the special issue of Gothic Studies (4/2.: 2002) dedicated to Gothic Cults and Gothic Cultures and launched by John Whatley's introduction on Modern and Postmodern Gothic. The general theoretical field has not failed to engage with the Gothic qualities of postmodernity: Jacques Derrida's hauntology, Jean Francois Lyotard's theorisation of the sublime and Jean Baudrillard's simulacra, in this respect, have been useful concepts to studies of Gothic postmodernism.
Beville's engagement with such critical readings of Gothic postmodernity is insightful, though she makes it clear that her reading of Gothic postmodernism does not take into account a notion of revival, but draws instead on Gothic's stubborn ability to 'survive' as it renews itself to reflect the cultural anxieties of a specific historical period. In doing so, Beville suggests that 'Victorian Gothic' and 'Romantic Gothic', for instance, constitute different genres in their own rights, and proposes a new generic definition to qualify the object of her investigation; her hyphenated Gothic-postmodernism stands for 'a hybrid mode that emerges from the dialogic interaction of Gothic and postmodernist characteristics ' (8-9). What perhaps remains slightly unclear is the emphatic shift from the use of Gothic as a noun in the previous accounts and the preference for the adjectival use with references to Modernism and Postmodernism,...