Middlebrow Gothic

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.