Coda

This final chapter addresses the loaded question of gothic naming, considering how and why it remains valuable to understand fiction with diverse regional and cultural roots within a (world-)gothic horizon. First we will briefly rehearse the argument that underpins one of this volume’s claim: namely, that to extricate gothic studies from the taxonomic bind in which it is placed concerning fiction from beyond the so-called West, the origin story of the gothic needs to be reconceived. Second we build on and draw together world-cultural and postcolonial theorisations of catachresis to conceptualise the categorisation and linking of discrete world-cultural forms as world-gothic. For ‘the gothic’ to remain useful as a way of designating fiction, we suggest that the term should be understood as just one possible name, which catachrestically – imperfectly and partially – describes heterogeneous and always situated cultural, folk and spiritual responses to the socio-ecological changes wrought in uneven ways by the capitalist world-system.