ABSTRACT The Gothic novel originated from English popular literature in the eighteenth century and matured into a full-fledged literature genre probing into space and subjectivity in the process of more than two centuries. With the contradiction and antagonism between space structure and feeling structure, the spatial and subjective experience of modern individuals fell into the abyss of uncertainty and angst. By the state of dynamic liminality and suspension, the Gothic novel uncovered the potential cultural entropy and fusion of modern space, and disclosed the potential disintegration and sublimation of modern selfhood. As a special vision and means of both diagnosis and prescription, Gothic literature elevated to a crucial mode of ethical, phenomenological, and philosophical inquiry in the course of historical evolution, with space and subjectivity in the state of liminality and suspension being its core themes.
Zhihui Yang (Fri,) studied this question.