Gothic narratives and tropes have surpassed the bounds of Euro-American cultural production, coming to the representative aid of monstrous colonial histories, uneven world-economic systems and the asymmetrical impacts of globalisation and climate change (Duncan 2018; Ilott 2019). The gothic cuts across time and space, providing an aesthetic vocabulary that registers the transgressive, the unreal and the unknown. If, as Fred Botting writes, ‘Gothic signifies a writing of excess’, then there are few tropes of the genre better suited to its exploration than the sublime (Botting 1996, 1). The sublime is an emotive aesthetic that conveys the experience of imaginative and rational failure in the presence of infinity or vastness, and, I argue, the incalculable alterations and mitigations of climate change. The argument of the chapter is not only that the gothic sublime assists in the representation of planetary shifts that are otherwise difficult to figure, but that it assists in representing the uneven distribution of these shifts.

In Amitav Ghosh's The Hungry Tide (2005) and Gun Island (2019), both of which chronicle the effects of extreme weather and habitat loss, the environment is often described in menacing and excessive terms. Similarly, in Alexis Wright's Carpentaria (2006), a town is erased by a cyclone and Will Phantom is left floating on an island of garbage. The difficulty of representing climate change is also the difficulty of accounting for it. This chapter demonstrates, therefore, that gothic tropes, particularly the sublime, are deployed to manage and register the unrepresentable extremes of climate change and its differential impact on peripheral countries and communities. Further, Ghosh's contrapuntal description of two tidal settlements, Venice and the Sundarbans, challenges the Global North/South binary. Wright's and Ghosh's novels imagine global relationships beyond national boundaries, presenting ‘global’ as a set of uneven and partial networks of human, cultural and economic exchange.

The Global South, Periphery States and Irrealist Aesthetics

This chapter begins by taking issue with the terms of its title. The ‘Global South’ refers generally to ‘the regions of Latin America, Asia, Africa, and Oceania’ (Dados and Connell 2012, 12). Like ‘Third World’ and ‘Periphery’, it signifies ‘regions outside Europe and North America, mostly (though not all) low-income and often politically or culturally marginalised. The use of the phrase Global South marks a shift from a central focus on development or cultural difference toward an emphasis on geopolitical relations of power’ (Dados and Connell 2012, 12).