Middlebrow Gothic
Dark Domesticity in British Popular Fiction, 1920–1960
Golygydd(ion) Christopher Yiannitsaros,Rebecca Mills
Iaith: Saesneg
Dosbarthiad(au): Literary Studies
Cyfres: Gothic Literary Studies
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This volume develops the idea of ‘middlebrow gothic’ to highlight an understudied area of Gothic scholarship: the work of middlebrow authors who employ Gothic conventions to interrogate and subvert the idealisation of domestic family and marital life following the trauma of the First and Second World Wars. The essays here include new perspectives on well-known authors such as Agatha Christie, Daphne du Maurier and Elizabeth Bowen, as well as recovering less-studied authors including Molly Keane (M. J. Farrell), Elizabeth Taylor and Margiad Evans (Peggy Whistler), demonstrating their valuable contributions to the history and evolution of Gothic literature. The fictions discussed reveal ‘Home Sweet Home’ to be anything but a sanctuary; the middle-class family home is rather a sinister site of buried secrets, paranoia and violence that spreads beyond the house to the social spaces and landscapes that lie beyond.
Acknowledgements
Notes on contributors
Introduction: Homing in on the ‘middlebrow Gothic’, Christopher Yiannitsaros and Rebecca Mills
Part I: Dangerous homes, dangerous families
Chapter 1 : The yellow wall-paper: Interior decorating and the family romance in Agatha Christie’s
Sleeping Murder’, Christopher Yiannitsaros
Chapter 2 : Subverting and distorting the home in a corpus of Weird domestic fiction from Handheld
Press, 1920–1948, Kate Macdonald
Part II: Dark places, Gothic geographies
Chapter 3 : Bordering the Gothic: the ‘Feminine Middlebrow’ and Anglophone Welsh Writing, Diana
Wallace
Chapter 4 : ‘It doesn’t take a witch to see goat-prints’: Gothic palimpsests and remote communities in
Golden Age detective fiction, Brittain Bright and Rebecca Mills
Chapter 5 : Queer spaces and monstrous women in Molly Keane’s Gothic parody Devoted Ladies (1934),
Christopher Yiannitsaros and Rebecca Mills
Part III: The post-war Gothic condition
Chapter 6 : Finding refuge in the spectre of war in Elizabeth Bowen’s A World Of Love (1955), Layla
Ferrández Melero
Chapter 7 : Middlebrow Gothic in Elizabeth Taylor’s novels, 1945–53: ‘A Climate of Melancholia’, Sue
Kennedy
Chapter 8 : Imagined pasts and invading presents: The myth of experience in Daphne du Maurier’s My
Cousin Rachel (1951) and The Scapegoat (1957), Laurie B. Huggett
Afterword: Placing, inhabiting and observing the middlebrow gothic, Simon Thomas
Bibliography
Awdur(on): Christopher Yiannitsaros
Awdur(on): Rebecca Mills