Not everyone is drawn to Gothic literature, but there is so much to say about the genre precisely because of its multifacetedness. Even though a piece of writing may not be deemed Gothic in its entirety (see Jane Austen and Charles Dickens, for example), we cannot deny that we can find Gothic elements here and there that gift texts with a dark side that makes them so interesting. It is extremely difficult to define Gothic literature, mainly because of its many different expressions and kinds, but if there is something we can safely say about the genre is that is its political dimensions. For the sake of clarity (which is deliberately blurred in discussions of the Gothic), we will follow Professor John Bowen in saying that the ‘genre of the Gothic is a particularly strange and perverse family of texts which themselves are full of strange families’ that contain poems, films, opera, video games, novels, and many more. According to Professor Bowen, Gothic texts exhibit traits like fear (terror, horror, etc.), mysterious places, tales of the past, the theme of power, darkness and ambiguity in meaning. Darkness, fear and the supernatural are key elements of the Gothic and acquire political significance when they are used for representation. According to Joseph Crawford, ‘it was not that Gothic fiction was generated by the fears of its authors; it was that Gothic, as a form, provided a methodology for writing about a subject – any subject – in such a way as to make it seem fearful and threatening’. More specifically, the Gothic ‘was a network of tropes, which collectively, served to either literally or metaphorically demonise its subject matter, whether that subject was a person, a house, a social group, or an entire civilization, by describing it as though it was an object of numinous dread’. This is evident in novels like Matthew Lewis’s The Monk (1818), Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1831), and Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), all of which explore the demonisation of whatever is different from what is considered the ‘normal’ self. The booming of Gothic fiction from the eighteenth century onwards is another factor for the political identity of the Gothic, since the Gothic underwent a radical transformation in meaning during the period of the French Revolution. A ‘byword’ for English heritage, Robert Miles argues, the Gothic represented an ancestral past that was variously seen as glorified (see Edmund Burke and his condemnation of the Revolution) or demonised as ‘the dead hand of the past’ (pp. 130-33) that haunts the living. During the Revolution and the post-revolutionary years, the Gothic was a genre of contestation because, on the one hand, it allowed for the play of imagination in mysterious worlds, and on the other it was seen as highly dangerous as the ‘monsters’ that were let in the reader’s minds (and bodies, as the effects of fear are highly psychophysical) could shape lives and ideas. All in all, Gothic literature provides a space for the exploration of what lies underneath but nevertheless ‘haunts’ us in its fearful presence. Works Cited Bowen, John, 'Gothic Motifs' (2014) <https://www.bl.uk/romantics-and-victorians/articles/gothic-motifs> [accessed 12 January 2021]. Crawford, Joseph, Gothic Fiction and the Invention of Terrorism; The Politics and Aesthetics of Fear in the Age of the Reign of Terror (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013) Miles, Robert, 'Political Gothic Fiction', in Romantic Gothic: an Edinburgh Companion, ed. by Angela Wright and Dale Townsend (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015), pp. 129-46 (pp. 130-33).