Abstract

Every Gothic fiction contains a secret history: lost manuscripts, doubled lives, mysterious menaces, dreaded revelations. More narrowly, secret histories are fictional works that offer imaginatively coherent yet nonstandard explanations for events transpiring in consensus reality. John Clute coined the term “Fantasies of History” for “Tales which uncover a Secret History of the World […] with the aid of fantasy devices […] invocations of Elder Gods […] fictional books […] secret masters” (Clute 1997: 334). Secret histories are not confined to the Gothic genre: similar techniques and tropes may be found in autobiography, the secret history of a life, or in nonfiction that presents conspiracy theories as fact (see secret societies ). Thrillers such as Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code (2003) and its imitators reveal secret histories, as do more ambitious works not generally considered Gothic such as Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum (1988), John Crowley's Aegypt sequence (1987–2007), and the novels of Thomas Pynchon and Don De Lillo.

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