Gothic Themes, Settings, and Figures | David Punter (Essay Date 1989)
DAVID PUNTER (ESSAY DATE 1989)
SOURCE: Punter, David. "Narrative and Psychology in Gothic Fiction." In Gothic Fictions: Prohibition/Transgression, edited and with an afterword by Kenneth W. Graham, pp. 1-27. New York: AMS, 1989.
In the following essay, Punter assesses Gothic fiction within the context of the psychoanalytic theories of Melanie Klein.
In this essay, I want to try to bring together some of the crucial features of Gothic fiction with one or two of the insights to be derived from psychoanalysis, but psychoanalysis of a particular kind: the school of psychoanalysis particularly associated with Melanie Klein, the so-called British School, which is also sometimes referred to under the heading of "object-relations psychology." In trying for this connection I am not simply practising an arbitrary yoking together of the heterogeneous. I believe that Kleinian psychoanalysis is very important, for...
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