It is doubtless that today’s Gothic fashion sells and sells in a particularly Gothic fashion. The Pop-Gothic culture reflected in the clothes – where the cute is made morbid and the morbid made cute, exemplified by many a headless Hello Kitty – serves to parody late twentieth-century sub-cultural manifestations of Gothic’s manufactured morbidity, its over-reliance upon interpretations of the Gothic as a source of gloom and as a style or social practice suitable for teenage transformation.

Dr Catherine Spooner is a senior lecturer in English at the University of Lancaster. Specialising in Victorian and contemporary literature she has a specific interest in the Gothic,...

October 2009 saw the publication of Soulless, the first of The Parasol Protectorate Books and Gail Carriger's debut novel. It was fresh, witty, and comic. It opened up a world populated with elegant vampires, werewolves, steampunk aesthetics and a heroine who had a taste for good tea and parasols. To paraphrase Jane Austen, "No one who had ever seen Alexia Tarabotti in her infancy, would have supposed her born to be an heroine." Alexia Tarabotti, like Catherine Morland in Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey, is indeed a gothic heroine, and her adventures can be followed in Changeless (March, 2010)