Rife with sexuality, chaos, confusion, and terror, the Gothic has seemed to many of its recent readers to be a subversive genre, resisting enforced gender constructions of straitened notions of rationality, disinterring that which has been forbidden or repressed.

In Alien Nation Cannon Schmitt moves away from these models of the genre to chart, instead, the ways in which Gothic fictions and conventions gave shape to a sense of English nationality during the century in which British imperial power was stretching out its greatest reach.