This thesis explores the field of Postcolonial Gothic, initially through an examination of theories of the Gothic and the postcolonial and their points of intersection. Homi Bhabha’s notion of the ‘unhomely’ as the paradigm for postcolonial experience, particularly with regard to migrancy and Julia Kristeva’s concept of the abject are identified as particularly productive for a Postcolonial Gothic framework, which is then applied to a survey of the way the Gothic is figured on the individual and the Local, regional or national levels in the context of Caribbean, Canadian, Australian and New Zealand postcolonial writing and demonstrates how the Gothic as a mode of writing furnishes postcolonial authors with a narrative strategy to express the traumas of colonialism and their postcolonial legacies. In coming to terms with the past, historical temporality and authority are rendered problematic by postcolonial writers because the physical and psychic violence of colonialism and its effects on the individual and on society are compounded by the repression of past trauma. The effects of such trauma threaten to resurface despite resistance. These experiences underpin the images of postcolonial revenants as hybrid, distorted and monstrous figures, which arise out of cultural contact between colonised and coloniser. The ghost, the phantom, the revenant, gain new meanings in the service of the postcolonial, where the duppy, and the soucouyant, from the Caribbean; the Bunyip from Australia and the shape- shifting figure of Coyote from Canada are hybrid manifestations created from European, indigenous and cross-cultural remains and they speak of culturally specific histories, traumas and locations. The thesis is arranged into four chapters: Caribbean gothic, Canadian Gothic, Australian Gothic and New Zealand Gothic. Each chapter provides an overview of the Gothic in the national or regional context, placing the emphasis on the postcolonial and then focuses on the way the Gothic is utilised by both dominant and marginal cultures: by white settlers and indigenous peoples in Canada, Australia and New Zealand, by the descendents of people forcibly mobilised through slavery in the Caribbean, and by other more recent migrants to, or between these locations. The writers discussed have different tales to tell about the effects of colonialism on the individual and on their society, but they have chosen the Gothic as means of expression for some of the most violent and unspeakable acts of colonialism and their legacy in the postcolonial

A colonial discourse has perpetuated the literary notion of islands as paradisal. The aims of this study are to explore how these entrenched notions of paradise, which islands have traditionally represented metonymically, are contested in the works of four postcolonial authors: Jamaica Kincaid, Romesh Gunesekera, Jean Arasanayagam and Lawrence Scott, from the island nations of Sri Lanka and the Caribbean. I have chosen three diasporic authors while the fourth, Arasanayagam, is an indigenous writer who still lives in Sri Lanka. Arasanayagam’s experience of living in a refugee camp in 1983 caused her to feel displaced in a way similar to those who have left their homelands. The purpose of including these particular authors in my study is to explore how their very diverse cultural experiences -- migrant or native, privileged or non-privileged, hybrid ancestry or culturally hybrid -- exemplify Homi K. Bhabha’s “hybridisation as a force of creative interaction” (Bhabha 1997: 2). I will use their work as examples of his theory of liminal space as a site of negotiation between cultures (Bhabha 2004). The mixed cultural heritage of these authors represents a doubleness which can be linked to the ‘double relation’ that Bhabha refers to in explaining hybrid translation as a process of cultural cross-reference. The study traces how the notions of island paradise have been represented in European literature, the oral and literary indigenous traditions of the Caribbean and Sri Lanka, a colonial literary influence in these islands, and the literary experience after independence in these nations. Persistent themes of colonial narratives foreground the aesthetic and ignore the work force in a representation of island space as idealised, insular and vulnerable to conquest; an ideal space for management and control. English landscape has been replicated in islands through literature and in reality the ‘Great House’ being an ideological symbol of power. Dorothy Lane has suggested that “the island can also be usefully employed by postcolonial writers to interrogate many of the assumptions of insularity” (Lane 1995: 4) and that “island discourse often incorporates several analogous figures of management and enclosure — such as the house and garden” (Lane 5). Using this as a point of departure for my study I have chosen texts which focus on gardens, island space and houses to explore how these writers from island cultures have responded to colonial narratives. These texts have previously been under-researched in the context of island motifs. This thesis explores how the selected postcolonial writers use these motifs to re-vision colonial/contested sites and in so doing offer an alternative space for negotiating the ambivalence of hybridity