“LET ME IN—LET ME IN!”

Abstract

With reference to Gothic literature, fiction influenced by the Gothic genre (in particular Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights) and recent acts of “terrorism”, this paper examines and complicates the perception of terror as something creeping in from “elsewhere” or, implicitly, something attacking the heart of “European civilizations” from post/colonial areas of disturbance and barbarity. It argues that a fuller understanding of the nature of terror in the world is vital to an understanding of “globalization”.

Keywords:

• Gothic
• the holy and the demonic
• displacement
• otherness
• fetishization of power
• instruments of terror