Beneath the covers: re-reading the modern gothic romance

This thesis examines the emergence of the modern gothic romance, a subgenre of popular romance fiction. The study intervenes in critical histories which represent the modern gothic romance as a simple and conservative genre which appeared in the 1960s as a hybrid of Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre and Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca. Rather than merely replicating the novels of Bronte and du Maurier, I argue that texts within the genre present different versions of resistance to the powerful Bronte-du Maurier tradition, which I interpret as an industrial narrative created by stakeholders to represent Rebecca's tale of femicide and marital abuse as a love story. I complement close reading of selected texts with an analysis of their commercial paratexts to argue that the modern gothic romance emerged from a diverse corpus whose representations of feminine domestic lives were both dynamic and complex.