This chapter rethinks Indigenous bodies and remains as unstable sources of scientific knowledge during a period of great violence and settler expansion: the late nineteenth-century incursions into Indigenous lands in Southern Argentina. Rodriguez compares the experiences of two prominent anthropologists, one an outsider (the German Rudolf Virchow) and one an insider-outsider (Argentine scientist Francisco P. Moreno) to show how their methods both overlapped and diverged based on their positionality. Rodriguez reads the scientists’ reports of their own emotive states as well as their interpretation of Indigenous peoples’ against the grain, revealing that underneath the authoritative scientific conclusions lay uncertainty and unease.

This chapter investigates the ways in which writers used the rapidly expanding wired networks of electrical communications technologies such as the telegraph and the telephone to reimagine notions of community, nation, and empire in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The development of electrical communication networks was motivated by, and in turn enabled, the spread of empire in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, establishing models of center and periphery in stark contrast with utopian predictions of global interconnection. Worth shows how telegraph and telephone wires were conceived not only as nerves connecting the globe, but also, acting as the circulatory system of Empire, as veins or arteries – “metaphorical carrier[s] not only of information but of blood.” In addition to establishing wired networks of earthly dominion, the telephone and telegraph opened imaginary connections into the uncanny and the otherworldly, seeming to transgress the boundary between life and death.

This essay presents congruities between Sebald’s juvenilia and his major works of prose fiction to reveal a portrait of a budding artist who never wandered far from his personal and literary origins and yet learned his lessons from these youthful ventures into writing. It introduces selections from his unpublished and fragmentary literary writings from the 1960s, which are housed in his literary estate at the DLA. These include the short narratives ‘Wartend’ (‘Waiting’) and the untitled story about Herr G. (Mr G.), along with the six-page play Der Traum ein Leben oder die Geschichte des Fr. v. Sch. (The Dream A Life, Or The Story of Fr. v. Sch.), and the two versions of his untitled novel. In these texts, one finds Sebald’s early critiques of capitalism and consumer culture, his interest in the uncanny, the agency of material objects, the crisis of the artist, the horrors of the past, the influence and violence of the totalitarian personality, the power of images, and the destruction wrought by nature. Sebald’s juvenilia make clear that they foreshadow the philosophical, historical, and sociological considerations in his mature prose fiction.

Australian novelist George Turner’s 1987 novel The Sea and Summer is one of the world’s first climate fiction novels, although James Edmond’s 1911 story, ‘The Fool and His Inheritance’, is a precursor to the genre. The early emergence of Australian climate fiction is not surprising given the country’s vulnerability to anthropogenic climate change. This chapter investigates the 35-year history of Australian climate fiction through an analysis of six novels, contemplating how environment, history and culture shape the use of genre, form and theme. It examines slow violence and flooding in The Sea and Summer; the intertwining of colonisation, environmental destruction and dispossession in Alexis Wright’s The Swan Book (2013); the use of the uncanny to explore the impact of ‘settlement’ in Jennifer Mills’s Dyschronia (2018); the effect of a changing climate on generations in James Bradley’s Clade (2015); and the psychological ramifications of the 2019–20 bushfires, evident through motifs of missing bodies and an invisible menace in Richard Flanagan’s The Living Sea of Waking Dreams (2020) and Inga Simpson’s The Last Woman in the World (2021). These novels, which are shaped by their production in a country with a fragile environment and a history of colonisation, offer varying visions of hope and despair.

This chapter draws parallels to the gothic trope that surrounded discussions on embryos in vitro in the 1980s as a frame of analysis that has grown in counter-response to law’s tendency to place entities either within the category of a ‘liberal, individual self,’ or outwith it (rarely in between). To explain, the gothic self is characterised by disorder, chaos, and dependency. It cannot be subsumed under the traditional ‘self’ that the law presupposes of its subjects. Further, within ‘the gothic’ lies the key concept of ‘monstrosity’, at the margins of what we deem to be human: ‘we stake out the boundaries of our humanity by delineating the boundaries of the monstrous’. While the gothic trope does not explicitly centre around ‘the in between,’ it is argued that we should see gothic entities as such, because of their common placement - legally, and sometimes socially - on the boundary between liberal, individualised human, and something akin to a science-fiction-esque ‘monster.’ The controversy that causes rhetorical parallels between new research and monstrous beings and mad scientists to be drawn is a major contributor to policy-makers reluctance to revisit the legal status of embryos in vitro.

In Propertius 4.7, Cynthia is conceived as the character who, in her role as the beloved, can infuse a sinister sensation of the grotesque into the very concept of elegiac love, of which she is the source and the protagonist. The poet ventriloquizes her voice, superimposing her role and gender identity on his, in a strategy that enables him to transmit to the realm of his aesthetic choices her grotesque embodiment of elegy, as well as her allegation that, in charging her with infidelity, he was not truthful about her. In this poem, Propertius’ elegiac programme appears to be centrally committed to a grotesque ethos, derisive and destabilizing of the epistemological and aesthetic conventions by which the genre is presumed to be governed. As a result, the conceptual and aesthetic domains of the genre appear deeply marked by uncanny imagery, contradiction, and instability of form. The imaginative world of this elegy requires readers to shift their interpretive base continually, accepting the incongruous realm of beauty pierced by ugliness as the manifestation of a poetic congruity of a higher order. That dialectical form of congruity is the distinctive feature of the Propertian elegiac grotesque.

This chapter explores the pervasive ways in which Gothic forces and affiliations appear in Dickens’s writings. The word ‘Gothic’ is rare in his work but an awareness of Gothic tropes, plottings and conventions is vital to understanding it. Gothic is used in highly innovative ways: to explore asymmetrical power relations of many sorts; to limit-test the idea of the ‘human’; and as radical social critique. The diabolical and uncanny are particularly powerful modes, and Dickens is pioneering both in his use of ‘virtual’ Gothic in A Christmas Carol and in the creation of ‘paranoid Gothic’ in the violent same-sex eroticism of Our Mutual Friend and the Mystery of Edwin Drood. Gothic is also an essential component of such scenes as Miss Havisham’s resemblance to ‘waxwork and skeleton’ in Great Expectations and Fagin’s and Monks’s appearance at the sleeping Oliver Twist’s window. The chapter discusses a wide range of Gothic presences in these and other works, concluding with a discussion of Dicken’s remarkable late essay ‘Nurse’s Stories’ (1863), a complex ‘meta-Gothic’ reflection on uncanny repetition and its simultaneously comic and diabolical power in subjective experience and narration.

Today, Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula (1897) is the best-known literary work that highlights the late nineteenth-century’s panoply of print and non-print media. This chapter analyzes how this focus allows the novel to set up a dialectic that has gone unremarked in previous critical accounts of it. In Dracula, gaps, losses, and incomplete translations between media become a source of uncanniness, producing the effect of the unreal and the paranormal. Yet the novel also presents the richness and particularity of multiple media giving way to the typewriter, a device that is supposed to yield that quintessentially modern substance, demediated information. With its vampiric power to feed on original media while converting and occulting them, the typewriter allows the novel to liquidate their aura of originality while keeping it hauntingly available, even undead.