Ours is an age of precarity, as fear and anxiety have come to define the twenty-first century. Politically, economically and socially, the neoliberal orthodoxy has becomeglobally dominantand, as a direct result, traditional frameworks of protection have been dismantled,whileexistential insecurity is increasingly passed from nations and institutions to individuals.
In the meantime, the Gothic mode of fiction is experiencing a new ascendancy, strengthening the argument that the Gothic represents the best literary mode with which to decode this age of precarity. In this context,the present studyoffers a groundbreaking examination of the Gothic mode's conceptual affinity with notions of neoliberal precarity.Exploring twenty-first-century Gothic fiction's engagement with the most pressing issues of our age,itconsidersthe oppression and existential entrapment experienced by marginalised populations in the provincial China of the late 1970s,and observesa modern-day Frankenstein's creature occasion violence and destruction across Baghdad post the 2003 Iraq War.The readerwill also discover vampires (representatives of a voracious, toxic economic model) in an alternate Mexico City, encounter a nomadic group traversing the only remaining wilderness in a near-future North America devastated as a result of the climate crisis, and be haunted by a spectral migrant who died in their efforts to flee political oppression in Vietnam.
