This book explores the complex relationship between British modernism and the Gothic tradition
over several centuries of modern literary and cultural history. Illuminating the blind spots of
Gothic criticism and expanding the range of cultural material that falls under the banner of
this tradition Daniel Darvay focuses on how late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century
British writers transform the artifice of Gothic ruins into building blocks for a distinctively
modernist architecture of questions concerns images and arguments. To make this argument
Darvay takes readers back to early exemplars of the genre thematically rooted in the English
Reformation tracing it through significant Victorian transformations to finally the modernist
period. Through writers such as Oscar Wilde Joseph Conrad Virginia Woolf E. M. Forster and
D. H. Lawrence this book ultimately expands the boundaries of the Gothic genre and provides a
fresh new approach to better understanding the modernist movement.
