Gothic Drift: The Case of ‘Raymond’ and ‘Arthur Kavanagh’

Abstract

Two opposed views of the history of Gothic fiction claim that a) the genre went into decline and ‘died’ in the early nineteenth century, and b) it has gone from strength to strength into the twenty-first century. This article defends a third hypothesis: that Gothic neither died nor endured but transformed into other genres to which the term ‘Gothic’ can apply analogically at best. Leaning on formal criteria (the codes or compositional conventions of eighteenth-century Gothic) it then offers a comparison between two short narratives thirty-three years apart, which, while being essentially ‘the same’ text, yet can be shown to belong to different genres. The article then projects the notion of language drift onto literary evolution to suggest that a form of genre drift accounts for this seeming oddity.