Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: Tracing the Modern Gothic
- 1 The Strangely Mingled Monster: Gothic Invasions, Occupations, and Outgrowths in Fin de Siècle London
- 2 The Old Subconscious Trail of Dread: Shadows, Animism, and Re-Emergence in the Rural World
- 3 In the Black Ruins of the Frenzied Night: Spectral Encounters in Wartime and Postwar London
- 4 From the Waste Land to the Dark Tower: Revitalizing the Rural Gothic in the Interwar Period
- Conclusion: Afterlives and Revenants of Gothic Modernity
- Notes
- Index
2 - The Old Subconscious Trail of Dread: Shadows, Animism, and Re-Emergence in the Rural World
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: Tracing the Modern Gothic
- 1 The Strangely Mingled Monster: Gothic Invasions, Occupations, and Outgrowths in Fin de Siècle London
- 2 The Old Subconscious Trail of Dread: Shadows, Animism, and Re-Emergence in the Rural World
- 3 In the Black Ruins of the Frenzied Night: Spectral Encounters in Wartime and Postwar London
- 4 From the Waste Land to the Dark Tower: Revitalizing the Rural Gothic in the Interwar Period
- Conclusion: Afterlives and Revenants of Gothic Modernity
- Notes
- Index
Summary
The wind blew wildly, and it came up through the woods with a noise like a scream, and a great oak by the roadside ground its boughs together with a dismal grating jar. […] The old Roman fort was invested with fire; flames from heaven were smitten about its walls, and above there was a dark floating cloud, like fume of smoke, and every haggard writhing tree showed as black as midnight against the black of the furnace.
—Arthur Machen, The Hill of DreamsWhile London is established as the central site of Gothic modernity in the late Victorian period, it is also true that the fin de siècle and the early twentieth century witness a parallel evolution of rural British Gothic fiction. This chapter investigates texts produced between the 1880s and the outbreak of the First World War, and considers how their representation of rural place is used to explore themes of the supernatural, terror, and the Gothic. The influence of metropolitan and industrial modernity, I argue, is often apparent in these narratives: it can be seen in the imagining of the rural world as a site invaded by the forces of a monstrous urban Gothic; or, conversely, in the focus upon new industries and technologies that are transforming the British countryside from within. If the Gothic is partly concerned with shadows, with the darkened spaces that ‘enlightenment’ paradoxically creates, then—as many of these texts suggest—rural Britain can be seen as a kind of counter-site to the modern metropolis, a world that is rendered more obscure even as society becomes more rationalized. In particular, it is an uncanny environment: while it is often coded as domestic and pastoral, these fictions explore what happens when apparently comforting and familiar landscapes are rendered disturbingly strange, as repressed anxieties, belief systems, or histories of trauma and violence re-emerge within this world. This is connected both to the pre-Christian civilizations that formerly occupied these places—the material traces of which are often still evident—and to older ways of experiencing and understanding landscape, particularly animism. While modernity, in a broad sense, may disconnect us from such ideas and histories, in doing so it also creates possibilities to re-encounter them in strange and disturbing ways.
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- Locating the Gothic in British Modernity , pp. 63 - 108Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2019