Book Review:

Review of Jerrold E. Hogle and Robert Miles's The Gothic and Theory: An Edinburgh Companion. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019. 344 pp. Hardcover (ISBN: 978-1474427777) Paperback (ISBN:  978-1474427784). Kindle (ASIN: B0C14YLXC1).

The twentieth century opened the dialogue of Gothic fiction and theory, connecting cultural, psychological, and aesthetic movements. While one might expect The Gothic and Theory to trace how literary criticism has historically viewed the Gothic over the last two centuries, the collection of essays subverts these expectations. Each essay provides a fresh contribution to the ongoing relationship between Gothic narratives and theoretical frameworks, demonstrating how intellectual movements have influenced both the production and analysis of Gothic texts. Divided into six sections across sixteen chapters, the collection examines the Gothic through historical, psychoanalytical, feminist, gender, media, and post-structuralist lenses.

The first section, The Gothic, Theory and History, includes one of the collection’s most thought-provoking essays: Maisha Wester’s exploration of race within traditional Gothic fiction. Wester demonstrates that minorities were often depicted through monstrous imagery to convey ideas about civilization, enlightenment, freedom, and human nature. Contemporary Black authors, however, challenge these normative structures in Gothic fiction. Using Phyllis Perry’s Stigmata, Wester skillfully articulates how whiteness functions as a “haunting spectre” contrasted against a tangible Black ancestral presence (64). Similarly, Wester shows how Ralph Ellison’s The Invisible Man exposes the destructiveness of pervasive whiteness, highlighting the Gothic potential of social norms as a source of horror (66). This essay reframes the Gothic as a lens for understanding racialized power and the uncanny normative constructions in fiction. 

In the following essay, Alison Rudd examines how the Gothic and postcolonial shape one another in “Postcolonial Gothic in and as Theory,” referencing Indigenous Australian author Mudrooroo's Master of the Ghost Dreaming series. In his postcolonial novels, Mudrooroo employs the concept of the uncanny to reimagine the history of Australia from the perspective of the Aboriginal peoples. In addition, Robert Miles presents an engaging essay on the genealogical Gothic, where history is often traced to trauma that leads to hauntings, fragmentation, and repetition. In his essay “History/Genealogy/Gothic: Godwin, Scott and their Progeny,” Miles uses William Godwin and Walter Scott to demonstrate an interplay between history and theory at the moment when the Enlightenment transitions to Romanticism, through historical romance (34). This persuasive argument explains how genealogy within the Gothic exposes unresolved violence that continues to disrupt the present.

In Part II: The Gothic of Psychoanalysis and its Progeny, Steven Bruhm revisits Freud’s psychological work, specifically "A Seventeenth-Century Demonological Neurosis" (1923), to signify the transformation of Gothic madness from a theological to a psychological phenomenon. Demonical possession shifted from an external, exercisable threat to an internal projection of Western subjectivity. Bruhm calls attention to the Gothic’s lasting fascination with the uncanny and the human psyche, underscoring how psychological theories continue to reshape interpretations of Gothic narratives and the supernatural. Jerrold E. Hogle builds upon this psychological emphasis with Julia Kristeva’s theory of abjection in Powers of Horror (1980) and the revolutionary impact it has had in the analysis of Gothic fiction.  Hogle argues that the theory of abjection gave critics the theoretical language to explain the Gothic reconceptualization of horror as psychological.

Catherine Spooner’s essay illuminates the tension between the Gothic and feminist thought in Part III: Feminism, Gender Theory, Sexuality and the Gothic. While women have dominated the Gothic as writers and readers since the eighteenth century, the genre often reduces them to victims within patriarchal frameworks. Spooner critiques historical Gothic fiction as overly complacent, reinforcing gender binaries and presenting female strength through narrow subordinate roles (133). She contrasts this with twenty-first-century Gothic media, which she describes as “barbaric feminism,” offering complex, provocative engagements with contemporary gender double standards (142). Spooner does not provide a resolution for the complicated relationship between the Gothic and feminism, but contributes divergent discourse to existing scholarship. Whereas feminist critics typically apply a feminist lens to Gothic texts, Spooner instead examines how the Gothic has shaped feminist thought.

The complex intersection of the Gothic and queer theory is addressed by George E. Haggerty. Drawing on The Castle of Otranto, Frankenstein, Dracula, and The Haunting of Hill House, he outlines how the queer defies the normative in Gothic narratives. Producing an insightful analysis of queer spectrality and the Gothic, he states: “those dreams of non-normative desire enacted are damning and unnerving in unexpected ways” (160), linking queer visibility to Gothic structures of repression and fear. Queer theory inspires us to turn a position of abjection into a source of strength, transforming something isolating into a positive (153). Sophisticated and exceptionally written, Haggerty’s essay is a standout contribution to the volume.

Moving forward to contemporary media in Part IV: Theorizing the Gothic in Modern Media, Elizabeth Bronfen argues that cinema inherently possesses a ghostly quality. Referencing Mad Men (2007-2015) and Alfred Hitchcock’s thrillers, Bronfen delineates how cinema allows the corporeal and the imaginary to cross boundaries, blurring distinctions from one another and giving it a Gothic quality. The strength of this essay is in its discussion of Freud’s uncanny as Bronfen emphasizes the disruption of ordinary reality, from hauntings to suspense, which is at the heart of film (170). This disturbance of normality creates anxiety within the viewer of the film, allowing the Gothic into contemporary media. Anya Heise-von der Lippe’s “Techno-Terrors and the Emergence of Cyber-Gothic” extends the discussion of the Gothic’s boundary-crossing to its connection with technology. Using James Tiptree’s science-fiction novella “The Girl Who Was Plugged In,” she explores Gothic media's destabilization of identity within the systems of technology and global capitalism.

David Collings’s contribution to Part V: The Gothic Before and After Post-structuralism uses Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho to explore the narrative theorization of symbolic change. Collings argues that this change extends beyond traditional narrative constraints. He situates Radcliffe’s work as a product of post-Revolutionary anxiety, as her protagonists face a world simultaneously lacking sympathy and indulging recklessness (209). Collings artfully reveals the ways in which Gothic fiction exceeds narrative boundaries and refuses to limit itself to a linear storytelling, with shifting narrative perspectives, unresolved mysteries, and the instability of meaning. Collings's analysis resonates with Tilottana Rajan’s “Incorporations: The Gothic and Deconstruction,” as both resist the rigid structures of history and theory by engaging with spectrality. This spectrality is addressed by Rajan across a wide theoretical field: Jacques Derrida on Abraham and Torok’s cryptonomy, Paul de Man’s analyses of Romantic texts, Michel Foucault’s reading of Raymond Roussel, and Catherine Malabou on the interaction of philosophy and neuroscience.

Continuing the discussion of the spectral, Fred Botting contributes “Dark Materialism: Gothic Objects, Commodities and Things,” focusing on how strange objects operate within the genre to expose a capitalist reality. Through George Bataille’s ‘base matter’ and Karl Marx’s theory of commodity fetishism, Botting reveals how Gothic objects represent excess and economic power, therefore connecting reality and the imaginative Gothic. Building on the discussion of the spectral and material Gothic, Anna Powell’s “Thinking the Thing: The Outer Reaches of Knowledge in Lovecraft and Deleuze” complements Botting by demonstrating how H.P. Lovecraft’s Things push thought to its limits. Powell claims that Lovecraft’s use of Gothic aesthetics and radical physics explore the outer reaches of knowledge, beyond logic and into feeling (264). The final essay in this section, by Dale Townshend, “Gothic and the Question of Ethics: Otherness, Alterity, Violence,” confronts the Other in Gothic fiction and film, raising ethical questions of its invocations. Townshend uses Emmanuel Levinas’s ethics of alterity to show how Gothic fiction and films encounter absolute otherness, counterintuitively associating the ethical with terror and violence. 

Finally, providing the anthology’s conclusion, David Punter reflects on the Gothic’s enduring mobility and evolving nature, specifically since his monograph The Literature of Terror (1980). Modern fiction presents a twist on a repetitive trope: the Gothic makes the monster the new form of the self, an exaggeration of our desires, fears, and moral dilemmas. He argues that the Gothic continues to resonate with theory, despite its historical and geographical limitations, through its resolute attention to the extremes: “in all manner of ways, some more melodramatic than others, but particularly through the extremes of the physical (bodily, material) and the supernatural (psychic, ectoplasmic)” (317). Punter concludes the Gothic will continue to resonate in the twenty-first century, but gives no predictions as to what is on the horizon.

Overall, The Gothic and Theory succeeds in providing innovative approaches to the Gothic across many theoretical frameworks. The most compelling essays in the collection bring forth new thoughts on race, feminism, queer theory, and contemporary media in association with the Gothic, providing insights that are applicable to the study of supernatural narratives and their cultural relevance. The scope of the discussion of media is broad, ranging from literature written in the eighteenth century to films from the twenty-first century. New and experienced scholars can gain new perspectives from the authors featured in this cohesive collection. This volume is recommended to anyone interested in expanding their knowledge of the interplay between Gothic fiction and critical theory.

-24 Jan. 2026