Introduction: Gothic Age and Ageing

In this introduction to the special issue, the editors sketch the major talking points within the recent turn towards examining Gothic fiction through the lens of age and ageing, and vice versa. They consider how the mode’s concern for the return of the past is readable as an anxious treatment of intergenerational relations, which are shown to contain the potential for coercion and exploitation. Gothic fiction brings to the fore the worrisome significations of old age in global societies that increasingly see age as a matter of productive output. The gothic figure of the vampire in particular reworks the archetypes of the ‘burdensome’ and ‘rapacious elder’, but in all cases (including the child-vampire) gains its threat and appeal from inverting age-based expectations. The mode also purposefully represents old age and ageing as abject or gruesome, foregrounding an uncomfortable possibility famously explored in Simone de Beauvoir’s La Vieillesse (1970); attempts to reverse or annul the ageing process receive similar treatment. The Introduction concludes with an overview of the contributions. Diverse in their subjects, and spanning the mode’s eighteenth-century origins through to its twenty-first century effusions, the essays nonetheless jointly evidence that age and ageing are integral to the form and function of the Gothic.