The recycling of a genre in late Victorian Gothic tales and Roald Dahl's 'Tales of the Unexpected'

Abstract

I am proposing a detailed examination of the presence and the handling of the topics that I have designated above as common thematic concerns to Victorian Gothic and Roald Dahl’s fiction: Fate, haunting, the encounter with the Other and the relation of science to nature. It is not by accident that I do not make lengthy claims on the historical origins of the genre, and I make absolutely no attempt to read either Victorian authors or Dahl as (in)sufficient reproducers of some obligatory model. All I attempt to do is find out how the Gothic as “an imperceptible catalyst” (Modern gothic: a reader 2) functions in a bunch of texts that are either contemporary or at least already detached from the historical embededness of the genre.