ABSTRACT

The Gothic piles on the sense of limits overrun: the present invaded by the past, life by death, human by inhuman forces, reason by dream-logic, taste and imagination by the sublime and the fanciful. Terror comes from the breach of boundaries: the vampire invited over the threshold, zombies massing at the last defense until it gives way under the pressure of undead bodies. The Gothic is insistently about spatial discomfort, whether from entrapment in dungeons or buried in a premature grave, the disorientation of labyrinths, or the annihilating sublimity of the vast openness of mountain ranges or Arctic wastes.