Introduction

Gothic Nostalgia is an original and innovative study of how Gothic nostalgia and toxic memory are used to underpin and promote the ongoing culture wars and populist politics in contemporary popular culture. The essays collected here cover topics from spectral to the ecological, and from Mary Poppins to John Wick. This is to reveal how the use of an imaginary past to shape the present creates truly Gothic times that we can never escape. The early twenty-first century is an age marked by extremes finding form in populist politics, climate change denial and religious and ideological fundamentalism amongst others. Much of this can be seen to be fuelled by a call to return to past values; a toxic nostalgia that imagines a hyper-normative history that is waiting to consume the present. It is no coincidence that these “hungry ghosts” find resonance with the Gothic which speaks of a past that often haunts and destabilises the present. This collection will look at the confluence between various kinds of toxic nostalgia and popular culture to suggest the ways in which contemporary populism has resurrected ideological monsters from the grave to gorge on the present and any possibility of change that the future might represent. Consequently, Gothic Nostalgia will focus on the convergence of two particular threads: the idea of nostalgia itself, both as a stand-alone concept but also in its relation to the Gothic; and, how this intersects with the idea of “toxic” and its inherent danger for an evolving present.