This dissertation reconceptualizes how we can think about space, place, and architecture within a Gothic context by combining two understandings of the theory of affordance. One is understanding affordance as a formal organizing principle, the other as a way of conceptualizing the relationship between human and environment. Affordance theory at its simplest understands a use of the environment as something it affords the user. When applied to Gothic horror and architecture, such a relationship becomes inverted because the focus shifts from what affordances are there, to what affordances ought to be there but are not. In a formalist sense, an affordance is something that can transfer across different forms of culture and narrative. For this dissertation, this combination of approaches is a way of understanding how everything from paintings to novels and films employ environmental affordance despite the differences of those mediums.The project draws long lines of influence from the Gothic mode’s inception in the mid-eighteenth century up until today. Each chapter reflects a different way to understand the utilization of place, space, and architecture, but they are bound together by that specific theoretical approach. The first chapter looks at place influencing perception, by looking at how the building’s form dictates what types of knowledge and understanding characters may have. The next focuses on space as something that constitutes memory in a ghostly setting. Here, Derridean hauntology is mixed with Michel de Certeau’s notions of space as practiced place. The third chapter analyzes the chase as a narrative device that explores the power relations within a space from the 1760s to the 1970s. The chapter thus finds that the chase is a stable contributor to the genre because it quickly establishes the stakes and metaphorical implications of the space. The fourth and final chapter examines the idea that place influences destiny in social problem novels of the nineteenth century and the public housing gothic of the twentieth century. This chapter serves as a culmination of the work laid down in the preceding ones in that it combines the elements of place, space, and media in its analysis of architecture.

This project explores a feedback loop between the State, military, terrorism studies, and the literary by examining how global anglophone literature concerning the War on Terror addresses the outcomes of surveillance, detainment, imprisonment, and torture upon the lives of Muslim subjects within cosmopolitan spaces across the world. I argue that Ishtiyaq Shukri’s The Silent Minaret (2005), Tabish Khair’s The Thing About Thugs (2010), Rajia Hassib’s A Pure Heart (2019) Fatima Bhutto’s Runaways (2019) are uniquely positioned to address the worldwide economic and social realities engendered by a discourse of the imperial imagination in which religion and race are constitutive of an ever-present and ever-elusive enemy from within. Each of the texts I explore in the chapters that follow take different approaches in portraying life within a Western secular paradigm, highlighting the resistance and consequences to their protagonists as they attempt to carve out space for faith, sovereignty, and political collectivity amidst the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.