Gothic Fiction

Fourteen world-class experts on the Gothic provide thorough accounts of this haunting-to-horrifying genre from the 1760s to the end of the twentieth century. Essays explore the connections of Gothic fictions to political and industrial revolutions, the realistic novel, the theater, Romantic and post-Romantic poetry, nationalism and racism from Europe to America, colonized and post-colonial populations, the rise of film, the struggles between 'high' and 'popular' culture, and changing attitudes towards human identity, life and death, sanity and madness. The volume also includes a chronology and guides to further reading.

This first volume of The Cambridge History of the Gothic provides a rigorous account of the Gothic in Western civilisation, from the Goths' sacking of Rome in 410 AD through to its manifestations in British and European culture of the long eighteenth century. Written by international cast of leading scholars, the chapters explore the interdisciplinary nature of the Gothic in the fields of history, literature, architecture and fine art. As much a cultural history of Gothic as an account of the ways in which the Gothic has participated within a number of formative historical events across time, the volume offers fresh perspectives on familiar themes while also drawing new critical attention to a range of hitherto overlooked concerns. From writers such as Horace Walpole and Ann Radcliffe to eighteenth-century politics and theatre, the volume provides a thorough and engaging overview of early Gothic culture in Britain and beyond.

This second volume of The Cambridge History of the Gothic provides a rigorous account of the Gothic in British, American and Continental European culture, from the Romantic period through to the Victorian fin de siècle. Here, leading scholars in the fields of literature, theatre, architecture and the history of science and popular entertainment explore the Gothic in its numerous interdisciplinary forms and guises, as well as across a range of different international contexts. As much a cultural history of the Gothic in this period as an account of the ways in which the Gothic mode has participated in the formative historical events of modernity, the volume offers fresh perspectives on familiar themes while also drawing new critical attention to a range of hitherto overlooked concerns. From Romanticism, to Penny Bloods, Dickens and even the railway system, the volume provides a compelling and comprehensive study of nineteenth-century Gothic culture.

The third volume of The Cambridge History of the Gothic is the first book to provide an in-depth history of Gothic literature, film, television and culture in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries (c. 1896–present). Identifying key historical shifts from the birth of film to the threat of apocalypse, leading international scholars offer comprehensive coverage of the ideas, events, movements and contexts that shaped the Gothic as it entered a dynamic period of diversification across all forms of media. Twenty-three chapters plus an extended introduction provide in-depth accounts of topics including Modernism, war, postcolonialism, psychoanalysis, counterculture, feminism, AIDS, neo-liberalism, globalisation, multiculturalism, the war on terror and environmental crisis. Provocative and cutting edge, this will be an essential reference volume for anyone studying modern and contemporary Gothic culture.

Through an investigation of the body and its oppression by the church, the medical profession and the state, this book reveals the actual horrors lying beneath fictional horror in settings as diverse as the monastic community, slave plantation, operating theatre, Jewish ghetto and battlefield trench. The book provides original readings of canonical Gothic literary and film texts including The Castle of Otranto, The Monk, Frankenstein, Dracula and Nosferatu. This collection of fictionalised dangerous bodies is traced back to the effects of the English Reformation, Spanish Inquisition, French Revolution, Caribbean slavery, Victorian medical malpractice, European anti-Semitism and finally warfare, ranging from the Crimean up to the Vietnam War. The endangered or dangerous body lies at the centre of the clash between victim and persecutor and has generated tales of terror and narratives of horror, which function to either salve, purge or dangerously perpetuate such oppositions. This ground-breaking book will be of interest to academics and students of Gothic studies, gender and film studies and especially to readers interested in the relationship between history and literature.

From the origins of the movement in the 18th century to contemporary writers such as Stephen King, this A-to-Z guide to Gothic literature covers a vast array of works and writers from Britain and America, as well as a variety of genres—novels, short stories, poetry, plays, and even a few influential films and works of art. The extensive Encyclopedia of Gothic Literature thoroughly examines this increasingly popular topic.

Comprehensive and wide-ranging, The Encyclopedia of the Gothic brings together over 200 newly-commissioned essays by leading scholars writing on all aspects of the Gothic as it is currently taught and researched, along with challenging insights into the development of the genre and its impact on contemporary culture. The A-Z entries provide comprehensive coverage of relevant authors, national traditions, critical developments, and notable texts that continue to define, shape, and inform the genre. The volume's approach is truly interdisciplinary, with essays by specialist international contributors whose expertise extends beyond Gothic literature to film, music, drama, art, and architecture. From Angels and American Gothic to Wilde and Witchcraft, The Encyclopedia of the Gothic is the definitive reference guide to all aspects of this strange and wondrous genre.

Gothic novels tell terrifying stories of patriarchal societies that thrive on the oppression or even outright sacrifice of women and others. Donna Heiland's Gothic and Gender offers a historically informed theoretical introduction to key gothic narratives from a feminist perspective. The book concentrates primarily on fiction from the 1760s through the 1840s, exploring the work of Horace Walpole, Clara Reeve, Sophia Lee, Matthew Lewis, Charlotte Dacre, Charles Maturin, Ann Radcliffe, William Godwin, Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, John Polidori, James Malcolm Rymer, Emily Brontë, Charlotte Brontë, Charlotte Smith, and Charles Brockden Brown. The final chapter looks at contemporary fiction and its relation to the gothic, including an exploration of Margaret Atwood's The Blind Assassin and Ann-Marie Macdonald's Fall on Your Knees. A Coda provides an overview of scholarship on the gothic, showing how gothic gradually became a major focus for literary critics, and paying particular attention to the feminist reinvigoration of gothic studies that began in the 1970s and continues today. Taken as a whole the book offers a stimulating survey of the representation of gender in the gothic, suitable for both students and readers of gothic literature.

This work offers a new perspective on Gothic fiction and reassesses its place in literary history. After defining his concept of "affective form" and summarizing the problematic assumptions behind recent critical approaches to the Gothic, George Haggerty introduces a startling theoretical discussion of the Gothic Tale, and he explains in what ways the tale, as a form with identifiable affective properties, is ideally suited to Gothic concerns. Having established a direct relation between this study and recent discussions of narratology and generic identity, Haggerty develops his argument as it applies to major Gothic works in both England and America, including works by Walpole, Radcliffe, Lewis, Maturin, Shelley, Bronte, Poe, Hawthorne, and James. He examines the Gothic Tale as a form that resolves the inconsistency and incoherence of many Gothic novels and offers even the best of them a center of focus and a way of achieving their fullest affective power. In this study, the Gothic Tale emerges as a means of heightening the emotional intelligibility of Gothic fiction and answering Walpole's confused desire to unite "two kinds of romance" in the Gothic. It is a form that can answer the ontological and epistemological, as well as the structural, challenge of the Gothic writers. From its first hints within the Gothic novel as an alternative literary mode offering the Gothicists various expressive advantages to its eerie success in a work such as James's "The Jolly Corner," the Gothic Tale offers insight into generic distinction and literary expression. This is a major statement about an important literary form.

The essays in this volume cover a wide range of topics including the concept of the numinous, demonic dread, the figure of the incubus, religious terror, Gothic iconography, and more.

This series provides accessible yet provocative introductions to a wide range of literatures. The volumes will initiate and deepen the reader's understanding of key literary movements, periods and genres, and consider debates that inform the past, present and future of literary study. Resources such as glossaries of key terms and details of archives and internet sites are also provided, making each volume a comprehensive critical guide.

This three-volume set spans all facets of the gothic, including visual and performing arts, society and culture, themes and settings and much more. Authors covered include: Margaret Atwood, Angela Carter, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Washington Irving, Stephen King, Edgar Allan Poe, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Bram Stoker, Oscar Wilde and many others. Complete with primary source documents and critical material to provide contextual perspective, a related chronology of key events, full-text commentaries, lists of further readings and many other extras, this new set benefits everyone from students doing gothic research to the general gothic fiction reader.

This book argues that the process and experience of travel in Gothic literature provides a unique and transformative perspective on the relationship between fear and recurring cultural preoccupations from the late eighteenth century to the present, ranging from concerns about climate change or the presence of the unseen to the negotiation of cultural difference and the apprehension produced by various modes of modern transport and unknown/unknowable terrain. The book follows travellers who take many fictional forms—tourists, commuters, walkers, explorers, as well as the 'armchair tourist' or reader—as they encounter fascinating, strange and often disconcerting weathers, climates, landscapes and topographies. Gothic travel epitomises the wonder, excitement, suspicion or incomprehension that arises from journeys through familiar and unfamiliar terrain. While exposure to the wild, elemental or primitive could produce the elevation of the sublime in early Gothic, increasingly the experience of travel raised unsettling questions about people, places and environments that lay beyond established frames of knowledge. Gothic travellers are haunted, never alone, and the experience of journeying through these landscapes provokes fears that may shadow them even after they have returned to 'home' ground. Climates of Fear reveals the persistent ways in which Gothic narratives of travel confront fears about the environment, surveillance, (im)migration and the foreign. These abiding concerns speak loudly to the present time, however, when the encroachments on our immediate surroundings - from climate change, digital communication and geopolitical dislocation—seem at once remote and intimate, invisible yet urgent. Thus the book also asks whether recent portrayals of Gothic journeys now pose different questions to the reader.

This revised new edition of The Handbook of the Gothic contains over one hundred entries on Gothic writers, themes, terms, concepts, contexts and locations, featuring new entries on writers including Stephen King and Wilkie Collins, new genres and a new Preface which situates the handbook within current studies of the Gothic.

Are ghosts, vampires, and other forms of 'haunted presence' related to universal religious instincts? Are emotions that play a part in religious ritual and narrative similar to those in classical works of Gothic fiction such as Dracula, Frankenstein, The Turn of the Screw, and the tales of Edgar Allan Poe. Haunted Presence: The Numinous in Gothic Fiction reveals the intersection of Gothic literature and contemporary theories about the psychology of religious experience, positing that the two share the concept of the numinous, the human response of awe in the face of the eternal. Varnado offers a fresh and audacious analysis of the literature of the supernatural by employing insights derived from the philosophy of religious experience. Ranging from the Gothic novel of the eighteenth century to ghostly tales from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Varnado frames ghost stories as ontological challenge to the reader. The challenge is not in the form of philosophical proposition, however. Rather it is in the form of feelings and emotions that maintain a connection with the sense of reality. It is this area of reality that Rudolph Otto called the numinous—the feeling of the supernatural—that stands at the center of Gothic literature. An understanding of this unique category of experience, aligned with its associated concept of 'the sacred and the profane,' exposes the purpose of ghostly literature and demonstrates the enduring relevance of this mesmerizing genre.

The History of Gothic Fiction debates the rise of the genre from its origins in the late eighteenth-century novel through nineteenth-century fictions of tyrants, monsters, conspirators and vampires to the twentieth-century zombie film. Approaching key novels by authors such as Walpole (The Castle of Otranto), Radcliffe (The Romance of the Forest and The Mysteries of Udolpho), Austen (Northanger Abbey), Wollstonecraft (The Wrongs of Woman), Lewis (The Monk), Shelley (Frankenstein), Stoker (Dracula) and Halperin (White Zombie), the argument proceeds on historicist principles, analysing the peculiar tone of these fictions and uncovering themes of credulity and reason, secrecy and enlightenment, tyranny and libertinism, sexuality and gender, race and miscegenation. The final chapters on the vampire and the zombie examine how the un-dead of gothic terror are embedded in an argument from history. Written with an undergraduate audience in mind, this text offers a synthesis of the main topics of Gothic interest and clearly argued summaries of critical debate. It signals its difference from popular psychoanalytic readings of Gothic and argues instead for a more complex, multilayered approach via an historicist reading of Gothic fiction. Illustrated with ten black and white plates and including up-to-date bibliographies, this will be an ideal text for all those with an interest in the Gothic...

Though once conceived of as mutually exclusive categories, Romanticism and the Gothic share a long and complex history of reaction and interaction, avowal and disavowal, influence and exchange. Extending recent critical interrogations of the Gothic / Romantic divide, this collection of essays provides a thorough overview of the manifestly Gothic impulses in Romantic-era literary culture, from the graveyard verse of the 1740s, through the heady politics of the later eighteenth century, and into the writings of the second-generation Romantic poets. Divided into three sections—'Gothic Modes and Forms'; 'National and International Borders'; and 'Reading the Romantic Gothic'; the volume comprises 18 original essays and a detailed introductory essay by an international cast of new and established scholars in the field. As much an introduction to Gothic writing of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries as it is a contribution to scholarly debates concerning the relationship between the Gothic and the Romantic, Romantic Gothic: An Edinburgh Companion is an indispensable resource for both students and scholars of British, American and European literary culture in the period 1740–1830.

In a wide ranging series of introductory essays written by some of the leading figures in the field, this essential guide explores the world of Gothic in all its myriad forms throughout the mid-eighteenth [century] to the internet age. The Routledge Companion to Gothic includes discussion on: the history of Gothic throughout the English-speaking world i.e. London and USA as well as the postcolonial landscapes of Australia, Canada and the Indian subcontinent key themes and concepts ranging from hauntings and the uncanny; Gothic femininities and queer Gothic gothic in the modern world, from youth to graphic novels and films. With ideas for further reading, this book is one of the most comprehensive and up-to-date guides on the diverse and murky world of the gothic in literature, film and culture.