The Modern Gothic and Literary Doubles: Stevenson, Wilde and Wells

Abstract

The Modern Gothic and Literary Doubles offers refreshing new analyses of the fictions of Gothic duality of Stevenson, Wilde and Wells. Establishing that a modern Gothic literary mode relocates the traditional rural Gothic of earlier writers to the late nineteenth-century metropolis, this volume examines how narratives of the period present London as the location of Gothic encounters and transformations. An understanding of London's cultural history in the nineteenth century helps to explain why the metropolis was such a fertile topic for the literary imagination to work upon, and this volume offers a comprehensive overview of the events and changes in the metropolitan landscape that informed modern Gothic fictions. The book demonstrates how narratives like Jekyll and Hyde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, The Time Machine and War of the Worlds were deeply influenced by late nineteenth-century perceptions of London, and are thus symptomatic of a modern, metropolitan Gothic.

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