Revolution, Empire, and the Gothic Dream

This monograph examines the centrality of dreams and their significant transformations in British Gothic novels and in Caribbean novels. The Gothic counters the Enlightenment’s internalization of dreams by reimagining dreams as social and political phenomena. They subsequently play vital roles in responding to profound questions concerning revolution and empire.

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This monograph examines the centrality of dreams in early British Gothic novels and the significant transformations of the Gothic dream later in Victorian novels and ultimately in Caribbean novels. The Gothic arises at a time when Enlightenment philosophy and medical science are making dreams and nightmares exclusively internal phenomena, relegating them solely to the realm of the individual. This monograph argues that the Gothic counters this movement by reimagining dreams as social and political phenomena. They subsequently play vital roles in cultural responsesto the profound questions of the eighteenth, nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries—namely, those concerning historiography, revolution, slavery, and empire. What we see is a vacillation between the sublime and the monstrous that reveals anxieties about British claims of progress and liberty. In the process, the Gothic dream comes to be a liminal space for the dramatisation of imperial fantasies and prophetic nightmares. In the twentieth century, postcolonial writers adapt the Gothic dream to subvert the teleology of imperialism.