Research Overview

My research explores the strangeness of work in contemporary culture, and how this manifests in contemporary literature as a Gothic experience. I argue that work has become Gothicised as we grow concerned about how it alters and consumes us in modern western working culture. Particularly, there is a trend within fiction that grapples with the Gothic nature of the modern corporate space. As a genre that emerges alongside the Industrial Revolution the Gothic is constituted by tensions between privilege and precarity. Despite affluent settings, precarious labour is highlighted and played out in contemporary American fiction as a Gothic tale, exposing a growing unease generated by the ‘corporatisation’ of everyday life. By marking contemporary western working culture with signifiers of terror and dread, fiction discovers within the Gothic mode strategies of resistance against insecure and precarious employment.