Gothic Precarity : Fear and Anxiety in Twenty-First-Century Fiction by Timothy Rideout

Ours is an age of precarity, as fear and anxiety have come to define the twenty-first century. Politically, economically and socially, the neoliberal orthodoxy has become?globally dominant?and, as a direct result, traditional frameworks of protection have been dismantled,?while?existential insecurity is increasingly passed from nations and institutions to individuals.?In the meantime, the Gothic mode of fiction is experiencing a new ascendancy, strengthening the argument that the Gothic represents the best literary mode with which to decode this age of precarity. In this context,?the present study?offers a groundbreaking examination of the Gothic mode's conceptual affinity with notions of neoliberal precarity.?Exploring twenty-first-century Gothic fiction's engagement with the most pressing issues of our age,?it?considers?the oppression and existential entrapment experienced by marginalised populations in the provincial China of the late 1970s,?and observes?a modern-day Frankenstein's creature occasion violence and destruction across Baghdad post the 2003 Iraq War.?The reader?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.
Binding: Hardback