TY - CHAP

T1 - Gothic and the Built Environment

T2 - The Architectural Uncanny and the Urban Sublime

AU - Wasson, Sara

PY - 2019/9/30

Y1 - 2019/9/30

N2 - Since antiquity, stories have persisted of human sacrifice when laying built foundations. In the superficial logic of such sacrifices (imagined or real), the resilience of the construction is ensured with death. Defying time, the durable edifice requires a blood payment. This trope crystallises the two themes of this chapter: the way that Gothic representations of the built environment imply that although the built environment is created by human beings, it can paradoxically be deathly to the human, yet simultaneously host to unnatural ‘life’, to an alien and malevolent agency. This chapter will explore some of the most characteristic manoeuvres in the symbolic repertoire of the Gothic of the built environment. I will approach the built environment not only in terms of the lone haunted house, but as conglomerations of structures; less single edifices than structures en masse, including city streets, fantastical architectures that blend castle and city, urban tunnels and catacombs, carceral architectures of contemporary detention, and (future) ruins of twenty-first century science.

AB - Since antiquity, stories have persisted of human sacrifice when laying built foundations. In the superficial logic of such sacrifices (imagined or real), the resilience of the construction is ensured with death. Defying time, the durable edifice requires a blood payment. This trope crystallises the two themes of this chapter: the way that Gothic representations of the built environment imply that although the built environment is created by human beings, it can paradoxically be deathly to the human, yet simultaneously host to unnatural ‘life’, to an alien and malevolent agency. This chapter will explore some of the most characteristic manoeuvres in the symbolic repertoire of the Gothic of the built environment. I will approach the built environment not only in terms of the lone haunted house, but as conglomerations of structures; less single edifices than structures en masse, including city streets, fantastical architectures that blend castle and city, urban tunnels and catacombs, carceral architectures of contemporary detention, and (future) ruins of twenty-first century science.

M3 - Chapter (peer-reviewed)

SN - 9781474432351

T3 - Edinburgh Companions to Literature and the Humanities

BT - The Edinburgh Companion to Gothic and the Arts

A2 - Punter, David

PB - Edinburgh University Press

CY - Edinburgh

ER -