In the Nightmare Country: John Metcalfe’s ‘The Bad Lands’

Abstract

‘In the Nightmare Country’ offers a detailed analysis of John Metcalfe’s short story, ‘The Bad Lands’ (1920), arguing that it represents an amalgam of Gothic and modernist devices and preoccupations that has significant implications for the development of twentieth-century British Gothic writing. The article considers how Metcalfe's story was shaped by Joseph Conrad and D. H. Lawrence on one hand and Freudian psychoanalysis and wartime experiences on the other. It also examines the important role played by the anthologist, Dorothy L. Sayers, in the popularisation of emerging forms of psychological gothic during the 1930s.