Empire and the Gothic: the politics of genre

Empire and the Gothic represents the first sustained consideration of the broad Gothic field by way of postcolonial criticism. The editors' intention was threefold. First, work was commissioned that developed either a new or a revisionist critique of Gothic texts already subjected to postcolonial analysis - my consideration of Dracula, for example, challenges the critical commonplace that scripts the vampire as an invading East, massed on the West's borders. Second, work was commissioned that expanded the critical field through the predication of unexplored or underexploited connections between imperialism and Gothic - in Russian Gothic or the circus, for example. Finally, a series of reconsiderations of authors not usually associated primarily with the Gothic - such as J. G. Farrell, J. M. Coetzee, Arundhati Roy and Salman Rushdie - were commissioned in order to supplement criticism in the field of postcolonial studies. Spivak's pioneering consideration of Frankenstein provides a central reference point to a volume which achieves a balance between the two disciplines, and a survey that facilitates a long view of their interface in fiction from the late eighteenth century to the present day, and across a range of writings that embrace the fictions of England, Ireland, Imperial Russia, India and South Africa.