Christos Tsiolkas’s first novel, Loaded (1995), was hailed as a profound example of the short-lived ‘grunge’ genre in Australia in the late twentieth century, but his work since that point is not typically viewed in that context, nor is that genre generally considered to have continued or evolved since the 1990s. This chapter returns to Tsiolkas’s grunge roots and demonstrates the continuation and evolution of the grunge genre across Tsiolkas’s oeuvre as well as its influence on the work of other contemporary Australian writers. Through comparative discussions of several practitioners of grunge, this chapter examines Tsiolkas’s influence on and development of a critical genre in Australian literary history, arguing that the evolution of Tsiolkas’s grunge and his influence on other grunge writers depends on a simultaneous absorption in and disruption of the myths and identities of the nation in its contemporary literature.

Jennifer Kent's The Babadook (2014) has received a great deal of critical attention, primarily for its depiction of monstrous motherhood. This essay seeks to extend that discussion through a comparison to Kent's second film, The Nightingale (2019), and its even more explicit construction of violence conducted by and against women. In this way we show that both films draw on the gothic trope of women suffering trauma and the more recent conversion of that suffering to the perpetuation of violent revenge. However, we argue that rather than constituting bravery, a restoration of justice, or a subversion of that victimization along the lines of the figure of Carol J. Clover's ‘Final Girl’, the acts of violence committed by the women in these films compound their traumatization by severing them from both others and themselves. The adoption of behaviours rendered masculine in the Gothic through the invasion of the home and the colonization of the bush thus confirms these women as monstrous rather than heroic. As in other recent Australian horror films, such as Julia Leigh's Sleeping Beauty (2011) and Sean Byrne's The Loved Ones (2010), women's monstrosity is bound up with their enactment of a masculine agency, such that there is no opportunity for them within the Australian Gothic to move beyond this traditional binary construct.

The Babadook and The Nightingale share many thematic and narrative concerns, but centrally, both depict a young woman struggling to deal with her traumatic loss: each film functions as a commentary on the impacts of gender on the experience of violence and mourning in the aftermath of horror, in the particular context of Australian colonial and contemporary history.

The popular Netflix series Stranger Things (2016–) partly derives its terror from its construction of a parallel universe termed the ‘Upside Down’. This alternate dimension is a site of chaos, destruction, and invasion, a space constructed in opposition to the civilization and familiarity of the small North American town inhabited by the series’ teenaged protagonists. A similar concept appears in the second season of the American series Channel Zero (2016–2018) in which an uncanny alternate universe is accessed via the ‘No-End House’; in this subverted world, people and things look the same as they do in the ‘real world’, but behave, horrifically, very differently. We borrow the term ‘Upside Down’ because the Otherness it evokes mimics the construction of Australasia as the ‘Antipodes’, a space not only geographically opposite to the northern hemisphere but, in the lingering relics of colonial discourse, culturally and philosophically opposite too. In Australia and New Zealand, such an orientalist or carnivalesque construction supposes, everything is ‘upside down’, topsy-turvy, out of place. As the travel writer Jan Morris famously wrote of the Land Down Under, ‘the water goes down the plug-hole the other way in Australia, and it really is possible to imagine, if you are a fancifully minded visitor from the other hemisphere, that this metropolis is clinging upside-down to the bottom of the earth’ (470).

Marie-Luise Kohlke and Christian Gutleben have identified the neo-Victorian Gothic as a mode particularly suited to political and ethical cultural engagement, precisely for the way in which it disrupts any “uniform” contemporary iteration of the Gothic; by returning to the past, the neo-Gothic “rekindle[s] an intensely disturbing desire that unsettles norms and redefines boundaries once more” (2012, 2). Indeed, the Gothic more generally attends to the social and cultural problems faced in the contemporary moment, precisely through its interest in the strange, the abject and the Other. This chapter examines the dinosaur narrative as a particular kind of neo-Gothic uniquely positioned to address the collapse of moral, spatial and historical boundaries. Addressing a selection of early dinosaur narratives, as well as the range of films in the Jurassic Park series (1993–2018), this chapter will explore the dinosaur as a figure of the limit of our Gothic imagination, that is, the point at which the known world reaches the boundaries of the unknown or other. In particular, however, the chapter will focus on the specific engagement with Gothic tropes in the most recent Jurassic Park film, Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom (2018): the isolated mansion, the rich benefactor, the orphan child, the presence of family secrets and the haunting or stalking figure. In the embedding of the conventional Gothic within a contemporary context concerned with environmental collapse, the dinosaur and its impossible presence is reinvigorated as a problem exceeding our capacity for conservative solution.

The Jurassic Park films, and in particular Jurassic Park: Fallen Kingdom, are perhaps most commonly and readily recognised (and marketed) as works of science fiction, rather than Gothic or neo-Gothic works; however, in their focus on the moral and ethical questions raised by scientific research, and particularly with the moral problems associated with creating (and destroying) artificial, unnatural or hybridised life, these works harken back to a long-standing narrative tradition in which the Gothic and science fiction intermingle.

Perhaps the most obvious precursor of this intermingling of the Gothic and science fiction is Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus (1818), in which the scientific research of the eponymous character results in the creation of an unnamed (and perhaps unnameable) monster who threatens the integrity of Frankenstein's mind, body and family.

Tammy Clewell's recent collection, Modernism and Nostalgia: Bodies, Locations, Aesthetics, constitutes an important reminder for scholars of the period: we must not stop at the simple assumption that the modernists were either progressive or conservative, or that their views of the past were either cynical or romanticised. The essays included here are interested in a peculiarly modernist nostalgia, ‘a modern state of mind’ (2), which arises as a result of an endless reference to the past, ‘reveal[ing] how deeply rooted in the damaged, the old, the vanishing, and the lost were the variety of efforts to imagine and produce the new’ (6).

Modernism has been a frequent touchstone of the memory boom in literary criticism. In the past few years alone, we have seen the publication of Tammy Clewell's Mourning, Modernism, Postmodernism (2008), along with Patricia Rae's Modernism and Mourning (2007), Robert Hemmings's Modern Nostalgia: Siegfried Sassoon, Trauma and the Second World War (2008) and Gabrielle McIntire's Modernism, Memory, and Desire: T. S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf (2008). All of these authors are contributors to the present volume, a fact which testifies to the calibre of the researchers included in this fine collection.

Modernism and Nostalgia has three sections: ‘Bodies’, ‘Locations’ and ‘Aesthetics’. The ‘Bodies’ section explores nostalgia as a kind of illness and includes essays on Rebecca West, Siegfried Sassoon, T. S. Eliot and Elizabeth Bowen. There are essays on Katherine Mansfield, Vita Sackville-West, Virginia Woolf, Arthur Symons, Thomas Burke, George Orwell and W. H. Auden in the ‘Location’ section, which examines nostalgia as dependent on particular places. Innovative textual representations of nostalgia are considered in the ‘Aesthetics’ section, which focuses on the writings of Rupert Brooke, Ezra Pound, E. M. Forster, James Joyce, Anthony Powell and Evelyn Waugh.

The collection traces the various states of longing exhibited by modernist writers, unified in a critical response to the past which sees little use in the selective remembering of Victorian nostalgia. As Clewell notes, the essays also speak across the book's divisions; indeed, valuable attention is paid to aesthetics – the linguistic or narrative construction of nostalgia – in most of the contributions, and each author adds to the collective and thoughtful unpacking of the relationship between modernism and nostalgia.