Introduction

This introduction establishes an alternative aetiology of the gothic, which we will define as world-gothic across this introduction. World-gothic affirms the transregional scope of gothic production, but it does not understand this as primarily constituting a global distribution and adaptation of conventions and aesthetics. Instead of tracking the outward spread of gothic forms from their birthplace in Europe, world-gothic places a question mark over this widely accepted origin story, asking us to think critically about the world-historical picture it assumes. To do this, we situate the late-eighteenth-century literary form that has come over time to be identified as ‘gothic fiction, in the context of what Immanuel Wallerstein called the capitalist world-system, a concept influentially reformulated by the environmental historian Jason W. Moore as the capitalist world-ecology, and which provides the basis for an approach to transregional cultural production named world-literature – or, more extensively, world-culture.