Gothic Matters: Introduction

Abstract

Text Matters, Volume 6, Number 6, 2016 DOI: 10.1515/texmat-2016-0001Agnieszka Soltysik MonnetUniversity of Lausanne, SwitzerlandOnce considered escapist or closely linked to fantasy, the Gothic genre (or mode, as scholars increasingly call it) has recently begun to be explored for its material concerns and engagement with real-world matters. This issue of Text Matters features essays that develop this line of inquiry, focusing on how the Gothic attempts to matter in concrete and critical ways, and mapping its rhetorical and aesthetic strategies of intervention and narration, affect and inuence. The pun in the title of this volumeGothic Mattersis intended to acknowledge both the material concerns of the Gothic as agenre and the continuing relevance and value of the cultural work performed by the Gothic, i.e. why it matters.The Gothic is the brainchild of the eighteenth century, an eminently modern aesthetic mode, obsessed with the cultural changes that were re-mapping Europe and North America. Born in the wake of the rst global warthe Seven Years War (also known as the French and Indian War) the Gothic quickly became associated with violent and sensational plots, an aesthetics of emotional extremes, graphic depictions of bodily injury, and nally, revolution itself. De Sade famously linked the Gothic to the political violence of the era when he suggested that Gothic novels were the necessary fruits of the revolutionary tremors felt by the whole of Europe. More recent observers and scholars of the Gothic have noted its inherently political and reformist bent, often tackling controversial social issues such as the social control of women, aristocratic privilege and class power relations, as well as traditional institutions including the church, the prison and the family (cf. Ledoux). The body was inevitably at the center of these explorations: its pain, discipline and control at the heart of the Gothics critical concerns.If revolutionary politics were the most obvious cultural context for some observers, the larger tectonic shifts in epistemology and moral judgment were also at stake. Changes in science, in political philosophy, and cultural values all impacted the Gothic, bringing with them afascination with cultural relativism, the complexities of social justice, and anew self-awareness about history. The Gothic staged and interrogated these questions with its narratives of cultural otherness, excessive revenge, and repressed or Gothic Matters: IntroductionAgnieszka Soltysik Monnet buried crimes that reverberated throughout family lines and local legends. Inherently sceptical of the Enlightenment values that nevertheless underpin its critiques of traditional institutions, the Gothic interested itself in alternative epistemologies such as folk culture, family legends, and rumors. Agenre of the forgotten, unspoken and buried, the Gothic gave voice to characters that normally had no voice or weight in society. Although often subversive, the Gothic was not inherently or inevitably so, and more conservative or even paranoid and reactionary formations exist, most notably what critics recently have come to call the Imperial Gothic, which uses the rhetoric of monstrosity to depict racial and colonial others.Nevertheless, the most interesting cultural work of the Gothic is linked to its creative explorations of the non-normative aspects of human life, such as the body in its queer, raced, gendered and physical materiality. It is no coincidence that many of the following essays focus specically on the body and its subversive materiality. The volume opens with two essays that take up the issue of the body specically within the context of the French Revolution. The rst, by Agnieszka owczanin, examines representations of female bodies in Matthew Lewiss The Monk and argues that they serve as interventions in the debates around revolutionary violence taking place in England at the time. …