Postmodern spatialities in the contemporary urban Gothic novel

This dissertation offers a sustained analysis of an otherwise undertheorised aspect of Gothic literature: space and spatial relations. Drawing on developments in other areas of Gothic criticism, such as the feminist work of Halberstam and Meyers, and the psychoanalytic work of Creed and Bruhm, this project rereads Gothic urban spaces and spatial relations in the context of postmodernity. It takes Gothic spatiality, conventionally understood as Manichean, static, and as offering simple substitutes for bodies in an oedipal drama, and sophisticates it through the work of such spatial theorists as Lefebvre, Foucault, de Certeau, Fiske, and Doel and Clarke. The project begins with some preliminary remarks on the interplay of the Gothic and spatiality in Fredric Jameson's Postmodernism, and it identifies the key spatial elements that will receive sustained discussion. It then moves on to examine six exemplary novels in three chapters. The discussion of Peter Ackroyd's Hawksmoor and Iain Sinclair's White Chappell Scarlet Tracings examines the role of the Gothic in representing a London whose material accretion of traces affords opportunities for the local reinscription of spaces and spatial relations. The discussion of Caleb Carr's The Alienist and Gary Indiana's Resentment examines efforts to organise American urban spaces synchronically into traditional static divisions, their success or failure in the management of the liminal, and the political, instrumental appropriation of this struggle. The discussion of Salman Rushdie's Fury and William Gibson's Pattern Recognition examines the Gothic space-time of the global city, shows the limitations of the represented urban spatialities of the previous chapters, foregrounds the renewed importance of relations of scale in the postmodern global city, and considers venues for the emergence of local spatialities and spatial relations.