Gothic realities: The emergence of cultural forms through representations of the unreal

Gothic Realities analyzes and investigates the fear that Gothic fiction has the power to change the real world. It begins with eighteenth-century British literary critics' concern about the Gothic's influence on impressionable readers. Critics feared that Gothic fictions could culture non-normative sexual feelings, encourage heretical belief in the supernatural, corrupt the young, and foment revolution. They lambasted subversive Gothic novels in order to contain the Gothic's threats with the stigma of low culture, and they elevated novels that seemed to eschew the Gothic's threats.; The second section of Gothic Realities confirms critics' concern about a culture of non-normative sexuality by showing how nineteenth-century Gothic novels helped shape homosexuality as a category of identity. Early in the nineteenth century, Gothic tropes of pathological reproduction, destructive narcissism, and eradicable monstrosity could signify a broad range of cultural fears. After Gothic fiction contributed to Oscar Wilde's criminal conviction in 1895, the tropes read as codes for homosexuality. They helped construct homosexuality as pathological, destructive, and eradicable.; The third section shows how the language of ghost fictions informs the reports and perception of "actual" ghosts by Spiritualists, ghost hunters, and parapsychologists. Ghost literature constructs fact in the language of fiction and fiction in the language of fact. Ghost fictions provide the epistemological framework within which people hear, see, touch, and smell real ghosts.; The final section focuses on contemporary debates about the effects of media violence, especially claims that Gothic writing, film, and music cause real-life crimes. Beginning with the 1999 massacre at Columbine High School, it relates attempts to blame Gothic artists for the massacre to other episodes of school violence that implicate Gothic art. Conceding that Gothic fictions influence the forms that crimes take, it argues against blaming fictions for the crimes they inform. It theorizes a difference between formative influence, which Gothic works have exerted for centuries, and culpable agency, which no fiction could ever possess.