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LITERARY HISTORY Australian Gothic The Anthology of Colonial Australian Gothic Fiction. Ed. by Ken Gelder and Rachael Weaver, Melbourne: Melbourne UP, 2007). 280 pp. A$34.95 ISBN: 978-0-522-85422-0
What could be called the "Gothicization" of Australian literary history probably began in earnest in 1991, wirh the publication ofjohn Docker's TheNervous Nineties, a groundbreaking study that attempted to integrate late-nineteenthcentury Australian writing into a fin-desiècle culture of decadence and anxiety. In the two decades since, interest in the Gothic has developed in accordance with a diverse set of political, theoretical, and cultural logics. To unpack the different investments concentrated in the Australian appropriation of die term would require more space than I have here, but put briefly, there are four obvious frameworks that contribute to the term's currency in Australian literary and cultural studies.
Firstly, the broader study of Gothic literature, developing hand in hand with the rise of literary rheory, has often been a way of pursuing rheory by other means. Texts like E.T.A. Hoffmann's "The Sandman" and Edgar Allan Poe's "The Purloined Letter," for instance, are clear touchstones for psychoanalytically informed post-structuralism. More broadly, however, texts in the Gothic canon (The Monk, Frankenstein and Dracula, most obviously) seem to anticipate, with uncanny precision, current academic explorations of gender relations, subjectivity, and race, and have thus become central to the literary studies curriculum. secondly, and in a more specifically Australian context, foregrounding rhe Gothic topoi (haunting, monstrosity, madness, rhe uncanny, for instance) at the center of Australian literature has been an effective way of displacing a narrowly nationalist pedagogy and of foregrounding rhe relationship between literary texts and colonial violence. Thirdly, the focus on a putatively popular genre accords wirh a current rethinking of taken-for-granted aesthetic hierarchies. And fourthly, in a cultural climate in which, at least according to broadsheet newspapers, courses in Australian literature are struggling to attract students, the study of Gothic texts promises the inherent appeal of a...