Gothic Re-Visions: 20th- and 21st-Century EcoGothic and Eco-Critical Perspectives in British Horror Fiction

Abstract

By employing ecocritical viewpoints to analyze how 21st-century British horror literature revives the Gothic tradition, this essay focuses on how ecological disaster, environmental anxiety, and the human–nature split are portrayed in modern stories. This paper situates its analysis within the emerging field of the EcoGothic, drawing on the underlying theory put forward by Andrew Smith and William Hughes in their characterization of Gothic as inherently linked to ecological critique (EcoGothic, 2013/2016, p. 4). Emily Horton's 21st-Century British Gothic (2024, p. 112) also offers helpful theoretical support, particularly in the chapter on "Wet Gothic," which explores ecofeminist horror in books such as Zoe Gilbert's Folk, Daisy Johnson's Fen, and Julie Armfield's Our Wives Under the Sea. Using examples of British horror fiction as case studies, this paper focuses on works such as Helen Oyeyemi’s White Is for Witching and Marian Womack’s The Swimmers, arguing that the Gothic genre foregrounds ecological agency and environmental retribution. The reading demonstrates how the sense of place, the uncanny landscape, and monstrous nature in Ross’s epic poem work as crucial registers of climate anxiety, gendered environmental violence, and post-Anthropocene dread. In the final analysis, the article concludes that it is in ecocritical Gothic voices that the most potent cultural critiques and imaginative antibodies for the salient disaster of an ecologically d