The Gothic is an Ur-mode in Australian literature for several reasons: It was popular historically in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries during which colonisation took place and white-Australian culture took root in the colonies (Turcotte 1998; Gelder 2012, 381); “Australian National Identity,” consolidated at the moment of federation of the colonies in 1901, took its literary form in what is known as 1890s Realism, a realism heavily saturated with the Gothic; and finally but perhaps most significantly, the cultural psyche of the nation is built upon the repression—and its return—of the horrors of violence on the colonial frontiers—eeriness and brutality of all kinds, including rape, murder and massacres of Aboriginal people. This psyche is insistently expressed in the literature of the nation; in both high and popular forms (Weaver 2009), Australian literature is and always has been awash with Gothic terror, grotesquerie, secrets and hauntings.

It is in this context that the present chapter makes a claim for a neo-Gothic zeitgeist in Australian literature, in which fundamental tropes of the Female Gothic are recast in a twenty-first century light (or, perhaps better, darkness). Three novels, two of them multiple award-winners—The Night Guest by Fiona McFarlane (2013) and The Swan Book by Alexis Wright (2013)—and one an overlooked novel by an author whose other works are also acclaimed, The Engagement, by Chloe Hooper (2016 [2012]), are three works that deploy in updated form some classic Female Gothic conventions. In their revisions, or repressions, to the classic Gothic tropes of the haunted house, the menacing male, criminal plotting and intrigue in relation to money and property, and doubles/doppelgängers and ghostly figures, these novels reflect contemporary social and cultural concerns of race and gender in both Australia and global modernity more broadly.

The spectrality central to the Gothic form aligns in these novels with the spectralising operations of contemporary globalised modernity. Perpetuating the capitalist-colonial structures that have always worked to the benefit of the white male subject, these ghosting forces of globalisation overcome the individual men in these novels but continue to secure their hierarchical power at the top of the structure of privilege.