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David Punter, The Gothic Condition: Terror, History and the Psyche (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2016)
The Gothic Condition consists of fourteen well-researched essays, collected from a range of articles and conference papers published and delivered by pioneering gothic scholar David Punter over the past sixteen years. Composed with Punter's characteristic erudite style, these essays provide compelling critical perspectives and readings of texts from within the gothic canon, but also of science-fiction novels such as M. John Harrison's Light (2002) and Nova Swing (2006), to name but a few. Despite the somewhat daunting abundance of endnotes, the majority of the essays in this collection focus on three central texts, while also weaving in numerous theoretical concepts and supporting primary material that ultimately form a common thematic thread. As discussing all fourteen essays in detail is beyond the scope of this review, I will focus primarily on four that have proven to be the most engaging.
In his Introduction, Punter explains that his present work is to be read as reflecting what he terms 'the Gothic condition' (p. 1) of contemporary society. He further develops this idea pointing out that
The Gothic condition is one in which no excess, no transgression [...] that can occur to the dark imagination can fail to find its equivalent in the 'real world'. Silent killing by drones; beheadings in the desert; the mass murder of children; racist attacks; endless violence towards women - all those are features of the current global landscape, and beside them, the so-called terrors of Gothic might seem pallid and even juvenile. (p. 3)
The first essay, entitled 'Spectrality: The Ghosting of Theory', provides thought-provoking perspectives on the function of the ghost and haunting within literary and cultural theory and criticism. Punter draws on Maurice Blanchot, Jacques Derrida, Nicholas Abraham and Maria Torok, as well as Jean Laplanche, among others, in order to demonstrate that the act of reading is an engagement with histories written by and regarding the dead. Psychoanalysis is central here, while the analogy between the 'psychic space' and the crypt is of particular interest, and goes beyond the Freudian concept of the 'return of the repressed'. In this combination of theory and literary tropes, the locus of the crypt functions as a...