Content area
Full text
Riquelme, Jean Paul, ed. 2008. Gothic and Modernism: Essaying Dark Literary Modernity. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. $25.00 sc. 236 pp.
Two of the most problematic and ubiquitous terms in the literary-critical lexicon are "Gothic" and "modernism." The former term is most commonly associated with a form of darkly themed sensational literature that cast shadows over the twilight of Enlightenment in late eighteenth-century Europe, originating in the popularity of novels by Horace Walpole, Anne Radcliffe and Matthew "Monk" Lewis, to name only a few. The latter term - although still widely debated - is generally used to refer to several loosely associated literary movements that sprung up, primarily in Western Europe and the United States, between 1890 and 1940, and it is generally associated with the work of T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf, among others. In Gothic and Modernism: Essaying Dark Literary Modernity, John Paul Riquelme provides a collection of critical essays that builds on the growing interest in the relationships between the Gothic and modernism while subsequently expanding the discourse into promising new directions.
In his introductory essay, Riquelme observes that"[t]he lineaments of a yet-to-be-written history of the modern Gothic begin to emerge in the essays published here" (2008, 5). This collection marks an effort to map the dissemination of Gothic concepts in the modern age. The book is divided into four parts beginning with three essays on canonical authors that locate the origins of "the modern Gothic" in the 1890s. At first glance the Gothic and Modernism may seem to be strange bedfellows, but Riquelme argues that "[t]he essentially anti-realistic character of Gothic writing from the beginning creates in advance a compatibility with modernist writing. That compatibility begins to take a visible, merged form in the 1 890s in Britain" (4). Although originating...