Gothic Precarity
Fear and Anxiety in Twenty-First-Century Fiction
Author(s) Timothy Rideout
Language: English
Genre(s): Literary Criticism
Series: Gothic Literary Studies
- September 2025 · 280 pages ·216x138mm
- · Hardback - 9781837722822
- · eBook - pdf - 9781837722839
- · eBook - epub - 9781837722846
About The Book
Ours is an age of precarity, with fear and anxiety coming to define the twenty-first century; politically, economically and socially, neoliberal systems and policies dominate globally. Traditional frameworks of protection have consequently been dismantled, and existential insecurity is increasingly passed from nations and institutions to individuals. Against this backdrop, the Gothic mode of fiction is experiencing a new ascendancy, strengthening the argument that the Gothic represents the best literary mode to address this age of precarity. Examining twenty-first-century Gothic fiction’s engagement with the most pressing issues of our age, the readers of this volume will consider the oppression and existential entrapment experienced by marginalised populations in the provincial China of the late 1970s, and observe a modern-day Frankenstein’s creature occasion violence and destruction across Baghdad post the 2003 Iraq War. They 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.
Contents
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