Gothic has often articulated fear as much through its depictions of
weather, climate and landscape as it has through its typical monsters,
and the relationship between geography, the environment and travel has
been a persistent characteristic of the Gothic from its earliest
moments. Gothic is an innately travelling mode of writing, and the
literary fascination provoked by armchair travel is central to the
navigation of cultural fears: 'strangeness' only becomes apparent once
one exchanges the homely (Heimlich) for the uncanny in new or
uncharted settings. This book will argue that what differentiates Gothic
travel from all other kinds is the growing realisation that the terrain
across which one journeys has become 'haunted' by what one finds there.
At the same time, that encounter similarly transforms the traveller 'for
good' whatever ghosts we encounter abroad follow us home and take root
in our collective consciousness. This book therefore argues that Gothic
literary travel plays a key role in giving expression to a range of very
'real' haunting anxieties. The strange and discomforting landscapes into
which our reading propels us allow those anxieties to take form while,
in turn, our experience of journeying through these landscapes enables
us, in part, to confront the fears they provoke.
This book argues that the process and experience of travel in Gothic
literature provides a unique perspective on recurring cultural
preoccupations from the late-eighteenth century onward, ranging from
concerns about climate change or the presence of the unseen to the
negotiation of cultural difference and the apprehensions produced by
various modes of modern transport. The book follows travellers who take
many fictional forms - tourists, commuters, walkers, explorers, as well
as the 'armchair' tourist or reader - as they encounter fascinating,
curious and often disquieting weathers, climates, landscapes and
topographies. Gothic travel epitomises the wonder, excitement, suspicion
or incomprehension that arises from journeys through familiar and
unfamiliar terrain. While exposure to the wild, elemental or primitive
could produce the elevation of the sublime in early Gothic, increasingly
the experience of travel raised unsettling questions about people and
environments that lay beyond established frames of knowledge. Gothic
travellers are haunted, never alone, and the experience of journeying
through these landscapes provokes fears that may shadow them even after
they have returned to home ground.
One of the reasons why Gothic literature remains as popular in the
twentieth and twenty-first centuries as it has ever been, despite our
lessening belief in the supernatural or the after-life, is because it
continues to provide us with a mechanism for giving shape to otherwise
formless but profound cultural concerns. The book questions, however,
whether Gothic literature per se remains a source of fear (as it
arguably was in its earliest phases), or whether it now provides a
'homeopathic' response to growing social, cultural and environmental
anxieties which loom large in our consciousness. It tracks the ways in
which Gothic literature, from the later eighteenth century to the
present, has always propelled fictional travellers abroad into
cultural landscapes which prove terrifying and unknowable, but also
questions whether more recent literary portrayals ask different
questions of their readers in relation to the environment, surveillance,
(im)migration, the foreign and technological innovation, as viewed
through the lens of travel. As this study will show, these expressions
of fear speak loudly to our own time, and are manifested not only in
contemporary Gothic literature but in the wider cultural discourse.
