Chapter Five focusses on another popular literary discourse, the Gothic, which emerged in the middle of the century and has sometimes been seen as a negative form of the sublime. Wright argues that it fuses various national and generic sources, troubling cultural boundaries and playing an important role in the development of Romantic literature despite its ‘terroristic’ association. Originating in European romance, the literary Gothic circulated around the continent via translations and free adaptations, making it difficult to identify specific sources. Walpole’s Castle of Otranto and Beckford’s Vathek, for example, rely on a combination of often unattributed British and French texts, whereas Ann Radcliffe’s European reception shows the permeability of cultural boundaries and reveals a community of tastes bridging the Channel. Wright then discusses French and especially German Gothic works, which became increasingly popular during the French Revolution, including The Book of Spectres, which indirectly influenced the age’s best-known Gothic romance, Frankenstein. As the author shows, the Gothic fostered communities of readers that transcended national borders, escaping the nationalist labels reviewers had attributed as a way of dismissing the genre, and making it truly cosmopolitan despite its local differences.

The surrealist imagination is an imagination at war. Born out of the horrors of the European trenches and catapulted into the nightmares of fascism, the Spanish Civil War, World War II, and the Holocaust, surrealism has always responded to the historical violence that has shaped and energized it. At the same time, however, surrealist responses to war are all too aware of their struggle to articulate their political nature. How can surrealism write war? What is the political import of surrealism’s indirect aesthetics? How might surrealist writing advance our understanding of the complexities of wartime subjectivity? This chapter explores these questions by turning its attention to two dark allegorical novels: Ruthven Todd’s Over the Mountain (1939) and Rex Warner’s The Aerodrome (1941). To date, discussions of British surrealist writing have confined themselves to the aesthetic and political contexts of interwar and wartime poetry. But there is a need to complicate this literary history if we are to better understand the diversity of British surrealist writing before, during, and after the Second World War. Whilst the novel was very much a marginal practice in 1930s and 1940s surrealist circles, it nevertheless emerged in the wartime period as a dark form of literary political enquiry; one that, coming through from the counter-Enlightenment impulses of the Gothic, poses disquieting questions about wartime human appetites for violence, corruption, and absolute power.