From its emergence in the early 1980s, gothic studies has been a predominantly Anglo-American critical discourse, both in its institutional locations within English departments and in its primary focus on English and American literature and film. There have been some notable exceptions to this rule, with critics including Avril Horner (2002), Peter Mortensen (2004), Diane Long Hoeveler (2010), Matthew Gibson (2013), Angela Wright (2013) and many others demonstrating that the gothic has been a transnational and trans-European phenomenon from its inception in the eighteenth century. In recent years, the framework of globalgothic developed by Glennis Byron (2013) has made a compelling case for conceptualising the gothic in even less anglophone ways within the continental and global realignments of politics, society and culture of globalisation. The cross-cultural manifestations and inflections of European gothic are familiar in discussions of late-eighteenth-century gothic, but in this chapter I aim to situate contemporary gothic narratives in literature and film from Europe against the background of ‘the collapse of blocs and borders, the emergence of transnational and economic unions, [and] spectres of superstates’ that Fred Botting and Justin Edwards have identified at the heart of globalgothic (2013, 12). The most obvious reference point in thinking about European gothic in this way is the emergence of the European Union (EU) as precisely such a transnational union, or ‘superstate’, over the last thirty years. For the purposes of this chapter, I will use the critical neologism ‘EU Gothic’ to describe different manifestations of the gothic that have emerged within the ambit of the EU, taking the processes of enlargement beginning with German unification in 1990 and the creation of the EU with the Maastricht Treaty (1993) as a key historical reference point. The EU will become visible as a backdrop for fictional narratives which are haunted by the effects of past nationalisms and national traumas, while also engaging with new insecurities arising from contradictions within the EU's formative ideologies between the national and transnational, the local and dislocated, and the liberal social policies and restrictive neoliberal biopolitics of and in the bloc.

Documenting the Spectres of Nations

From its inception, the EU has been haunted by historical traumas. The bloc's history begins with Robert Schuman's suggestion that a European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) between France and West Germany could reduce national competition and military conflict in post-World War II Europe.