Introduction: Going to Extremes: The Gothic in the Twentieth Century

Summary

The twentieth century brought us antibiotics, air travel, vastly improved sanitation, the computer, the emancipation of women (in much of the world), the concept of the teenager and a substantial rise in global life expectancy. It also brought the 1918–19 influenza pandemic, chemical warfare, the Holocaust, climate change, overpopulation, two world wars and the atomic bomb. As Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm put it, the century was ‘an Age of Extremes’. He observed that

An age of catastrophe from 1914 to the aftermath of the Second World War was followed by twenty-five or thirty years of extraordinary economic growth and social transformation, which probably changed human society more profoundly than any other period of comparable brevity. In retrospect it can be seen as a sort of Golden Age, and was so seen almost immediately it had come to an end in the 1970s. The last part of the century was a new era of decomposition, uncertainty and crisis […].

Events that took place in the last century continue to shape our lives in ways both self-evident and less immediately obvious. It is, for instance, catastrophically evident that the oil booms, pollution and consumer culture of the mid-late twentieth century were the principal causes of the global warming crisis that is now causing unprecedented wildfires, floods and temperature rises. In a less immediately obvious case of cause and effect, we might ask whether the UK's June 2016 EU membership referendum would have been a surprise victory for the ‘Leave’ campaign had it not been for the fact that a significant proportion of the British population is still enthralled by a sense of Britishness rooted in nostalgia for the ‘glory days’ of the Second World War and the lost pre-eminence of the British Empire. Or, on a similar note, would Donald J. Trump have become the 45th President of the United States in 2017 if he had not been able to evoke so crudely but effectively an idealised version of the middle-class (white) lifestyle rooted in an intensely exclusionary version of the American 1950s? As a mode dedicated to the cultural and literary exploration of chaos, repression, violence, irrationality, the macabre, haunted architecture and haunted minds, the Gothic is uniquely positioned to dramatise and interrogate historical and cultural anxieties which mainstream literary and popular culture suppresses, overlooks or refuses to openly engage with.