At World's Edge: Post/Coloniality, Charles Maturin, and the Gothic Wanderer

Abstract

Laura Doyle, “At World's Edge: Post/Coloniality, Charles Maturin, and the Gothic Wanderer” (pp. 513–547) The Gothic text has been shown to represent colonialism's crimes through its literary tropes of imprisonment, terror, rape, and tyranny. This essay takes a further step to propose that Gothic texts also register the historical resistance to colonialism's crimes. That is, they refer to anti-colonial insurgency—in Ireland, India, the Caribbean, and elsewhere—in the process evincing ambivalent anxieties about global, imperial instability. After reviewing the Gothic‘s entanglement with discourses of both liberation and barbarism, reflective of its contradictory political investments, the essay focuses on Charles Maturin's Melmoth the Wanderer (1820) to demonstrate the ways in which Gothic texts are structured against insurgency even as, in their “wandering,” haunted figures, they unveil a world in turmoil.