The Gothic Other Racial and Social Constructions in the Literary Imagination

The literary use of the Gothic is marked by an anxious encounter with otherness, with the dark and mysterious unknown. From its earliest manifestations in the turbulent eighteenth century, this escapist mode has provided for authors a useful ground upon which to safely confront very real fears and horrors. The essays here examine texts in which Gothic fear is relocated onto the figure of the racial and social Other - the Other who replaces the monster as the code for mystery and danger, the horrifying and the unknowable. The essays reveal that writers from many cannons and cultures are attracted to the Gothic as a ready medium for the expression of racial and social anxieties. The essays are grouped under such topics as race, religion, class, and centers of power.