In this collection we examine closely and celebrate the place of comedy in the Gothic. Research in this area has burgeoned and now academ¬ics are investigating the role of Comic Gothic not only in the work of established authors and celebrated films, but also in children's literature, cartoon mash-ups, performance art and modern media. Gothic scholars no longer easily dismiss humour in dark texts as ‘comic relief’ and their work is altogether more nuanced and sophisticated in its understanding of how, and to what end, comedy informs Gothic texts.

When our book Gothic and the Comic Turn was published in 2005, we hoped that it would open a new line of enquiry into Gothic litera¬ture and film. We argued then that the contemporary understanding of Gothic did not capture the hybridity of most Gothic works; signifi¬cantly, their juxtaposition of incongruous textual effects – in particular comedy and horror – tended to be overlooked. We suggested this aspect of the Gothic mode, combined with its inherent instability and hybrid¬ity, enabled it simultaneously to appal and amuse. The ‘comic turn’ in Gothic is not, we claimed, an aberration or a corruption of a ‘serious’ genre; rather, it is intrinsic to a mode of writing that has been hybrid since its very inception.

It is perhaps no coincidence that the rise of Gothic was contemporary with the rise of opera and melodrama. Creators of all three were cas¬tigated for ignoring generic conventions; for embracing surface rather than depth; for delighting in excess: the result is ‘absurd’ and ‘mon¬strous’ works that evoke laughter as well as horror. Building on Peter Brooks's argument in The Melodramatic Imagination (1995), that ‘the melodramatic mode is an inescapable dimension of modern conscious¬ness’, we suggested that the comic within the Gothic foregrounds a self-reflexivity and dialectical impulse intrinsic to the modern subject. Aspects of comedy, such as irony, satire, parody, pastiche and the absurd, play important roles within this dialectic.