Gothic Precarity

Fear and Anxiety in Twenty-First-Century Fiction

Timothy Rideout (Autor)

Buch | Hardcover

280 Seiten

2025
University of Wales Press (Verlag)
978-1-83772-282-2 (ISBN)

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Ours is an age of precarity, as fear and anxiety have come to define the twenty-first century. Politically, economically and socially, the neoliberal orthodoxy has become globally dominant and, as a direct result, traditional frameworks of protection have been dismantled, while existential insecurity is increasingly passed from nations and institutions to individuals. In the meantime, the Gothic mode of fiction is experiencing a new ascendancy, strengthening the argument that the Gothic represents the best literary mode with which to decode this age of precarity. In this context, the present study offers a groundbreaking examination of the Gothic mode's conceptual affinity with notions of neoliberal precarity. Exploring twenty-first-century Gothic fiction’s engagement with the most pressing issues of our age, it considers the oppression and existential entrapment experienced by marginalised populations in the provincial China of the late 1970s, and observes a modern-day Frankenstein’s creature occasion violence and destruction across Baghdad post the 2003 Iraq War. The reader will also discover vampires (representatives of a voracious, toxic economic model) in an alternate Mexico City, encounter a nomadic group traversing the only remaining wilderness in a near-future North America devastated as a result of the climate crisis, and be haunted by a spectral migrant who died in their efforts to flee political oppression in Vietnam.

Timothy Rideout is a doctoral graduate of the University of Lincoln; he currently works in the field of health and social care leadership and management.

Introduction: A Time of Gothic Precarity
Theoretical Framework
Definitions of Precarity
The Literary Gothic and Political Discourse
Fearful Precarity
Monstrous Precarity
Uncanny Precarity
Prevarication and Precarity
Structural Outline
Chapter One: The Genealogy of Precarity
The Origins of Precarity
Chinese Gothic
Gothic precarity and existential entrapment in Yiyun Li’s The Vagrants
Fear and the Uncanny in The Vagrants
Gothic Counter-Narratives in The Vagrants
Chapter Two: War Precarity
War Gothic
Neoliberal Wars, War Precarity and the ‘Shock Doctrine’
Fear and Monstrous Precarity in Ahmed Saadawi’s Frankenstein in Baghdad
Uncanny Hesitation and Uncertainty in Frankenstein in Baghdad
Chapter Three: Economic Precarity
Economic Precarity
Vampiric Economics and Economic Vampires
Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s Certain Dark Things and Mexican Precarity
Certain Monstrous Things
Un-Certain Dark Things
Chapter Four: Migrant and Refugee Precarity
Precarity’s migrants and refugees
Neoliberal Hauntology: ‘The failure of the future’
Gothic Narratives of Migration and Seeking Refuge
The Spectral Refugee in Viet Thanh Nguyen’s ‘Black-Eyed Women’
Chapter Five: Climatic Precarity
Gothic Ecology
A Neoliberal Climate Crisis
Monstrosity in Diane Cook’s The New Wilderness
The Uncanny Wilderness
The Fearfully Uncertain Wilderness
Conclusion: ‘We [still] live in Gothic times’
Concluding Findings
Bibliography

Erscheinungsdatum	06.09.2025
Reihe/Serie	Gothic Literary Studies
Zusatzinfo	Not illustrated
Verlagsort	Wales
Sprache	englisch
Maße	138 x 216 mm
Themenwelt	Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Anglistik / Amerikanistik
Themenwelt	Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Literaturwissenschaft
ISBN-10	1-83772-282-X / 183772282X
ISBN-13	978-1-83772-282-2 / 9781837722822
Zustand	Neuware