Abstract

The intense, uncanny relationship between intimacy and exclusion, homeliness and strangeness finds evocative expression in the Gothic tales and ghost stories of James Hogg, Robert Louis Stevenson and Margaret Oliphant. Their narratives resist and open themselves to haunting, with the supernatural alterity they encounter proving oddly familiar and posing fundamental questions about knowledge and subjectivity. In these moments, distinctions between inside and outside in psychic, social and environmental terms are radically unsettled. Using Jacques Lacan notion of ‘extimacy’, an ‘intimate exteriority’ that constitutes an estranged attachment to the stranger within, this article examines the varying ways in which Hogg, Stevenson and Oliphant struggle with, or attempt to accommodate, this intimate yet agitating sense of otherness that disrupts the assertion of identity.