Theory in the Shadows: Speculative Realism and the Gothic, 1890-1920

Abstract

Gothic scholarship has enjoyed a long and fruitful relationship with developments in philosophy, the various systems and insights of which have informed, and continue to inform, much of what is commonly called literary theory. This thesis proposes that the recent “speculative turn” in continental philosophy provides fresh tools for reconceptualising theoretical approaches to the Gothic. More than this, however, it also examines how Speculative Realism and Object-Oriented Ontology make use of a Gothic thematics – that is, how they are, themselves, Gothic. Through a series of innovative new readings of four works of Gothic supernatural fiction – M.R. James’s Ghost Stories of an Antiquary, Algernon Blackwood’s Pan’s Garden: A Volume of Nature Stories, Vernon Lee’s Hauntings: Fantastic Stories, and Florence Marryat’s The Blood of the Vampire – this study finds the shadowy worlds of the Gothic to be a better indicator of the real than literary realism, and lays the groundwork for a Speculative Realist critical idiom in Gothic studies. It posits, and is organised around, four conceptual frameworks: weird hauntology, dark ecology, necro-empathy, and bilateral identity. The Gothic is a genre fundamentally entangled with questions of ontology; the ghost wavers at the threshold of being. Traversing historicism, formalism, and various strands of literary theory, Theory in the Shadows: Speculative Realism and the Gothic, 1890-1920 lingers at these thresholds, and plots the key coordinates in a new, ontological methodology.