Abstract

To understand the figuration of the author within the contemporary Gothic, it is first essential to recognize the genre's notable fixation on the written word. With the advent of postmodernism, the Gothic's focus on textuality has tended toward an overt metafictional staging of textual engagement. The writing process is now a recurrent theme within Gothic writing. This is not a truly new phenomenon, however, but the inverse of a long-standing interest in reading that has been present in the Gothic since its formative phase (1764–1820). Postmodern culture has replaced reading with writing as the focus of the Gothic's innate self-reflexivity, but this is not a paradigm shift; instead, it is a development within a genre that has always had much to say about readers, writers, texts and the relationship between them.