In the decade since Glennis Byron published her edited volume Globalgothic (2013), to date the most influential account of gothic fiction in the international context, the sense of ‘the global’ has shifted. For Byron, and the contributors to her collection, the ‘global’ was largely synonymous with ‘globalisation’, and specifically with ‘globalisation’ as a late-twentieth-century phenomenon. Hence, ‘globalgothic’ was theorised in respect to what, at this time, was taken to be the emergence of a ‘new world order’ (Byron 2013, 3), one that superseded and complicated a pre-existing set of global relations configured under the auspices of Western imperialism. In place of older critical discourses describing predatory transnational vectors of exploitation and domination, there appeared a different theoretical vocabulary, which focused on such issues as the transnational mobility of people and commodities; intertwining advancements in technology, media and global communication; the rise of immaterial work and speculative finance capital; and newly conspicuous forms of cultural hybridity and multidirectional exchange. Shaped by these ideas, globalgothic came to be understood as the product of a novel and multipolar geopolitical landscape, both reflecting new pluralities and intersections of cultural voices, and at the same time articulating anxieties that emerged from the disturbance of established identities and traditions. Above all, globalgothic appeared in the context of a world characterised, as Byron put it, by ‘flows’ (3) – flows of people, money, goods and cultures – the fluidity and complexity of which seemed to nullify now apparently too simplistic accounts of imperial capitalist expansion.

It may already be clear from this brief synopsis that the vision of the world underpinning globalgothic no longer maps seamlessly on to the global situation. At the time of writing this, just over two years into the Covid-19 pandemic and amid spiralling transformations to the Earth's biosphere, the trenchancy of ‘old’ lines of power is starkly and grimly evident. Covid and climate change need, importantly, to be understood as two linked dimensions of the same planetary shifts, since as Andreas Malm has pointed out, the instance of ‘zoonotic spillover’ (2020, chap. 2) out of which the novel coronavirus emerged is itself the effect of commercial deforestation across Southeast Asia, which – driving biodiversity loss and destroying habitats – channels novel pathogens directly towards humans as the most prominent remaining species.