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To reiterate, this study considers the sublime effects of terror as the heart of Gothic and Gothic-postmodernist literary exploration. Significantly, enunciating aspects of the sublime effects of terror is the primary function of Gothic rhetoric. It is also the primary task of postmodernist art and literature as it is perceived as a route to the unknown, unrepresentable aspects of self and reality. Consequently, each chapter of this book, in seeking out a definition, analyses each of the chosen texts with sublime terror as a starting point, holding it to be the genre's central dialogical element. It is the most apparent common denominator between the Gothic and postmodernism, which establishes the intensity of the relationship between the two in both literary and philosophical terms and will, thus support the definition of each work under the tenets laid out here as Gothic-postmodernism.
The conventions accepted here as characterising the emergence of Gothic-postmodernism as a new and distinct literary genre include: the blurring of the borders that exist between the real and the fictional, which results in narrative self-consciousness and an interplay between the supernatural and the metafictional; a concern with the sublime effects of terror and the unrepresentable aspects of reality and subjectivity; specific Gothic thematic devices of haunting, the doppelgänger, and a dualistic philosophy of good and evil; an atmosphere of mystery and suspense and a counter-narrative function. Through analysing of the interaction of these Gothic and postmodernist characteristics as Gothic-postmodernism, it becomes clear that shadows and gloom, turbulent landscapes and demonised, ghostly or monstrous characters are a central part of the generic substance of Gothic-postmodernism, and subsequently of its representation of otherness: the 'subterranean areas behind everyday experience' (Carter 2006, 133).
More specifically, Gothic-postmodernism can be understood as a distinct genre by its own self-consciousness. Within the genre, multiple levels of self-irony tender a unique set of meta-discourses which run subversively against mainstream society and the literature that claims to represent it. Its meta-narratives operate to disrupt the dominating narrow accounts of history, religion, culture and identity by referring to inverted versions of the same, often implied by fantastic devices. Mikhail Bulgakov's novel is a worthy example, as is Rushdie's and more explicitly Amis's, which literally inverts the narrative to present history in reverse. Similarly,...