ABSTRACT
The invigorating reconceptualization the Gothic mode has endured since its inception in the eighteenth-century renders visible an aesthetic that continually structures the zeitgeist of the contemporary world. Gothic fiction at the beginning of the twenty-first century has violently disrupted any kind of credibility, demolished ideological totems, and hence coincided with postmodernism’s “incredulity towards metanarratives” (Lyotard, Condition xxiv). In Gothic times, as coined by Fred Botting (“Aftergothic” 286–87), margins become the norm, occupying a central cultural place; and as a result, the center does not hold. Thus, the Gothic mode—largely appropriated, deconstructed, and reinvented—unfolds into polyhedral narratives where images materialize, recede, and disappear.
