We are seeking a limited number of essays to complete an edited collection exploring the connections between the gothic genre and literary modernism. Inspired by the work of scholars such as Sam Wiseman, Linda Dryden, David Punter, and the late John Paul Riquelme, this collection will consider how and why gothic elements such as dark doubles, the uncanny, the return of the repressed, haunted spaces, etc. enter modernist writing. Often thought of as a genre of gratuitous spookiness, overwrought romance, and stagey melodrama, the gothic’s association with so-called ‘low-culture’ allows modernist texts to speak to larger cultural fears and neuroses and provides modernism with a dramatic and aesthetic vocabulary for encountering questions of evil, anxiety, the relationship between the natural and the supernatural, and more, within the context of the rapid economic changes and major geopolitical crises of the twentieth century.

The edited collection consists of three interconnected sections: the home, the metropole, and the colony. Please submit abstracts which could work within one of these thematic frameworks. We have a selection of strong essays across a wide range of disciplinary contexts and methodological approaches and are looking to add to the collection a few essays on less or non-canonical texts, particularly those written by underrepresented authors. Essays on the frameworks and intersections between the Gothic and anglophone modernisms are also welcome. 

The collection is already in talks with Clemson UP, and as such, we are requesting that authors who submit abstracts be willing to operate on an expedited timeline in completing their essays. Topics may include: 

-gothic ‘low’ culture in modernist texts

-gothic modernism and affect

-images of evil/the gothic villain in modernist literature

-gothic femininity/the gothic heroine in modernist literature

-the gothic and twentieth-century war

-industrial gothic in modernist texts

-colonial gothic in modernist texts

-modernist dark doubles

-the modernist uncanny

-Gothic hauntings in modernist spaces and texts

-the Gothic and the non-human in modernist texts

Please send a 250-300 word abstract and a CV by November 30, 2024, to Catherine Enwright and Daniel Dougherty at enwrighc@bc.edu. Full manuscripts for selected submissions will be due by February 15, 2024. We look forward to receiving your abstracts.