Mapping Gothic London: Urban Waste, Class Rage and Mixophobia in Dan Simmons's "Drood"

This chapter investigates the Gothic London topography which characterises Dan Simmons’s "Drood" (2009), a novel pivoting on images of urban pollution, crime, segregation and threatening ethnoscapes. In reinventing Victorian London from a postmodern, postcolonial and poststructuralist point of vantage, Simmons turns it into a site of dialogic confrontation across ages, cultures and ways of ‘writing the city’. Especially noteworthy is the novel’s re-mapping of lower urban strata, such as the slums, the sewer channels, the burial grounds and the subterranean hideouts of the dispossessed. The political, socio-cultural and philosophical meanings attached to these frightful spaces are analysed in the light of twentieth-century theories developed by Baudrillard, Bauman, Derrida, Foucault, Kristeva and Said, whose ideas give insights into Simmons’s neo-Victorian re-imagining of the first modern metropolis.