David Punter and Glennis Byron notam que “é possível falar do Gótico como um

fenômeno histórico originado (no sentido literário) no final do século XVIII. No

entanto, para vários críticos, é mais útil pensar em termos de argumento psicológico
que tem a ver com formas como medos reprimidos são representados no texto” p.
XVIII (gothic, punter). Para os autores, de Ann Radcliffe até William Gibson, “é possível
apontar a persistência extraordinária de alguns temas, como vampiros ou o potencial
monstruoso da ciência e da tecnologia. (p. XIX)

“The Gothic novel began to emerge at a time when the forces of industrialization were
transforming the very structures of society. As Britain gradually changed from an
agricultural into a industrial society, there was a steady movement of the population
out of rural areas into the urban-centred industrial world. The traditional social system
collapsed as new types of work and new social roles were established. Emergent
capitalism led to a growing sense of isolation and alienation, as increasing
mechanization divorced workers from the products of their labour, and the urban
centres disconnected them from the natural world” (p. 20)

“As the nineteenth century progressed, the damaging effects of industrialism became
increasingly clear and had much to do with the emergence of a new site of Gothic
horror: the city. In Victorian Gothic, the castles and abbeys of the eighteenth century
give way to labyrinthine streets, sinister rookeries, opium dens, and the filth and
stench of the squalid slums.” (p. 22)

“There was a return of interest to the more materialist sciences, however, during the
second half of the twentieth century as the technological explosion created a new set
of anxieties that are reproduced and intensified in the Gothic. With advances in
weaponry, for example, the proposition that the end of the end of the world was near
no longer seemed quite so fantastical. (…)
“What might appear most notable about Gothic fiction’s engagement with technology
today is the way in which notions of the human continue to be disrupted. The horror
of the artificial human, first proposed in Shelley’s Frankenstein, re-emerges in an up-
to-date form with the possibility of new kinds of simulated life, with cyborgs, animated
machines, and reproduction by computed or genetic engineering. “What is expelled in
the fantastic flight to hyperreality”, Fred Botting suggests, “is the ‘meat’, the term
employed by cyberpunk writers to denote the formless bodily excess of no use to
machines” p. 24

“The Gothic is frequently considered to be a genre that re-emerges with particular

force during times of cultural crisis and which serves to negotiate the anxieties of the
age by working through them in a displaced form” P. 36

Possibility of the primitive infecting the civilized world. P. 40 – BR acha que o primitivo
pode salvar o mundo

Etymologically speaking, the monster is something to be shown, something that serves

to demonstrate and to warn. (p. 263)
“What is primarily important for the Gothic is the cultural work done by monsters.
Through difference, whether in appearance or behavior, monsters function to define
and construct the politics of the ‘normal’. Located at the margins of culture, they
police the boundaries of the human, pointing to those lines that must not be crossed.”
(263)
Representation and interpretations of monstrosity repeatedly change over time.

“One of the most notable changes in more recent representations of Gothic

monstrosity involves a shift in sympathies and perspectives. (…) In recent Gothic, Fred
Botting observes that monstrous figures are now much ‘less often terrifying objects of
animosity expelled in the return to social and symbolic equilibrium’. Instead, they are
‘sites of identification, sympathy, and self-recognition. Excluded figures once
represented as malevolent, disturbed, or deviant monsters are rendered more
humane while the systems that exclude them assume terrifying, persecutory, and
inhuman shapes’(Botting 202: 286) (p. 265)

The monster is explicitly identified as that society’s logical and inevitable product:
society, rather than the individual, becomes a primary site of horror.