SOURCE: "Gothic Fragments and Fragmented Gothics," in The Gothic Sublime, State University of New York Press, 1994, pp. 83-116.

In the following excerpt, Mishra discusses Polidori's The Vampyre and Ernestus Berchtold as exemplary of a particular type of Gothic fiction: a deliberately inconclusive work intended to arouse fear, astonishment, or delight that appears fragmentary because it is not resolved.

There is a class of Gothic texts that I would want to refer to as symptoms of the form insofar as it raises problems hidden "by the completeness of works that have attained the status of 'texts'." If in literary terms transcendence always implies a way of totalizing so that the work of art itself triumphs over the contradictions rendered in the social formations depicted in the text (the Marxist sublime), then the extreme version of its negation would be texts that are so ruptured, so rent apart, that they...