Gothic and Modernism: Essaying Dark Literary Modernity (review)

Abstract

Riquelme, Jean Paul, ed. 2008. and Modernism: Essaying Dark Literary Modernity. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. $25.00 sc. 236 pp.Two of most problematic and ubiquitous terms in literary-critical lexicon are and modernism. The former term is most commonly associated with form of darkly themed sensational literature that cast shadows over twilight of Enlightenment in late eighteenth-century Europe, originating in popularity of novels by Horace Walpole, Anne Radcliffe and Matthew Monk Lewis, to name only few. The latter term - although still widely debated - is generally used to refer to several loosely associated literary movements that sprung up, primarily in Western Europe and United States, between 1890 and 1940, and it is generally associated with work of T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf, among others. In and Modernism: Essaying Dark Literary Modernity, John Paul Riquelme provides collection of critical essays that builds on growing interest in relationships between and while subsequently expanding discourse into promising new directions.In his introductory essay, Riquelme observes that[t]he lineaments of yet-to-be-written history of modern begin to emerge in essays published here (2008, 5). This collection marks an effort to map dissemination of concepts in modern age. The book is divided into four parts beginning with three essays on canonical authors that locate origins of the modern Gothic in 1890s. At first glance and Modernism may seem to be strange bedfellows, but Riquelme argues that [t]he essentially anti-realistic character of writing from beginning creates in advance compatibility with modernist writing. That compatibility begins to take visible, merged form in 1 890s in Britain (4). Although originating in late eighteenth-century, themes such as doubling, haunting of present by past, play of light and shadow, and discourses of hierarchical power structures continued to influence writing of influential fin-de-siecle authors. Oriented by 1890s as decade of confluence between and Modern, Riquelme 's collection traces evolution of modern beyond its nineteenth-century origins, charting its interactions with national literatures and political events outside England (4).Reading Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891) [a]s revisionary interpretation of Pater's late Romanticism, Riquelme argues that Wilde's literary chiaroscuro and his utilization of convention of doubling reveals darker side of Pater's aesthetic ideas, creating more complex, multifaceted portrait of artist. The Picture of Dorian Gray provides touchstone for mapping out history of modern as Riquelme notes that this particular instance of excess marks turning point in literary history toward literary modernism (26). This is followed by an outstanding essay by Joseph Valente on Bram Stoker in which he examines Stoker's use of duality as means of projecting anxiety of his own in-between position as a member of conquering and vanquished race, ruling and subject people, [and] an imperial and an occupied nation (47). In next essay, Patrick O'Malley isolates primary motif of as uncanny eruption of past into present and he provides an interesting reading of Thomas Hardy's Obscure (1895) - work not traditionally thought of as - as last nail in coffin of proper by making thrill of what was once exotic familiar. If Austen's Northranger Abbey rejected because it was too foreign to English experience, writes O'Malley, Jude destroys it because it has become too familiar (75). …