Introduction: Queering Contemporary Gothic

Abstract

After referring to Jeanette Winterson’s The Daylight Gate (2012) to illustrate some of the distinctive feature of queer Gothic fiction, the chapter summarises the development of queer Gothic from the eighteenth-century to the present-day. Critics such as George E. Haggerty and William Hughes, who have recognised the importance of the form, receive reference. The influence of Female Gothic, significant for its utilisation of feminist theory to explore female-authored texts, is discussed, as also are the roles that the 1970s lesbian and gay liberation movements and the growth of queer theory in the 1990s played in furnishing a context for the production of queer Gothic fiction. The chapter concludes with a section illustrating the way in which Gothic motifs, such as spectrality, secrets, the monster, the double, death and excess, furnish vehicles for representing aspects of queer sexuality and gender in the writing of Judith Butler, Jay Prosser and other theorists. This furnishes a context for the analysis of the fiction in the following chapters.