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Female Gothic Histories traces the development of women's Gothic historical fiction from Sophia Lee's The Recess in the late eighteenth century through the work of Elizabeth Gaskell, Vernon Lee, Daphne du Maurier and Victoria Holt to the bestselling novels of Sarah Waters in the twenty-first century. Often left out of traditional historical narratives, women writers have turned to Gothic historical fiction as a mode of writing which can both reinsert them into history and symbolise their exclusi...

This small collection of essays explores women's relationship with the gothic: a relationship which has, since its eighteenth-century beginnings, always been complex. These essays demonstrate some of the scope and diversity of that relationship, and much of its intensity: the ingenuity and genius employed, the anguish experienced and the risks taken, in its evolution. Genuinely representative of gothic's flexibility and presence in everything from novels to architecture, from surrealist art to h...

"The world is so sad and solemn," wrote Nathaniel Hawthorne, "that things meant in jest are liable, by an overwhelming influence, to become dreadful earnest; gaily dressed fantasies turning to ghostly and black-clad images of themselves." From the radical dualism of Hawthorne's vision, Samuel Coale argues, springs a continuing tradition in the American novel. In Hawthorne's Shadow is the first critical study to describe precisely the formal shape of Hawthorne's psychological romance and to explo...

The Gothic is wildly diverse. It can refer to ecclesiastical architecture, supernatural fiction, cult horror films, and a distinctive style of rock music. It has influenced political theorists and social reformers, as well as Victorian home décor and contemporary fashion. Nick Groom shows how the Gothic has come to encompass so many meanings by telling the story of the Gothic from the ancient tribe who sacked Rome to the alternative subculture of the present day. This unique Very Short Introduc...

A truly cosmopolitan Irish writer, George Moore (1852-1933) was a fascinating figure of the fin de siecle, moving between countries, crossing genre and medium boundaries, forever exploring and promulgating aesthetic trends and artistic developments: Naturalism in the novel and the theatre, Impressionism in painting, Decadence and the avant-garde, Literary Wagnerism, the Irish Literary Revival, New Woman culture. This volume on border-crossings offers a variety of critical perspectives to approac...

Recent critics view Wordsworth's incarnational rhetoric as the expression of an unfulfilled desire for representational adequacy. David Haney, however, argues that Wordsworth's interpretation of the Christian concept of incarnation engages historical contingency and mortality by emphasizing the translation of spirit into mortal, historical humanity. The incarnational analogy also provides an important locus for Romantic thought about the tension between the inherited Enlightenment epistemology b...

Horror and Religion is an edited collection of essays offering structured discussions of spiritual and theological conflicts in Horror fiction from the late-sixteenth to the twenty-first century. Contributors explore the various ways that horror and religion have interacted over themes of race and sexuality; the texts under discussion chart the way in which the religious imagination has been deployed over the course of Horror fiction’s development, from a Gothic mode based in theological polemic...

This is the first book to analyse the Mozambican modern ghost story, establishing the genre's unique characteristics, situating it in a transnational context, and distinguishing it from other supernatural traditions. The study discusses why it emerged in different historical moments in Mozambican literature and how it was adapted in the process. Relying on a combination of short and close readings, this book offers a large scope spanning almost two centuries. It examines works of prominent and l...

The romance, the major secular genre for three hundred years, stands to medieval literature as the novel stands to the literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Mr. Stevens stresses, especially in his introductory chapters, the continuity between medieval and later literature. The subjects of medieval romance are the great and permanent concerns of the human mind-man loving, man fighting, man alone, man with his lover, his leader, or friends, man facing mystery, or death, man seeking...

The very word 'culture' has traditionally evoked the land. But when such writers as William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lord Byron, and, later, Matthew Arnold developed what would become the idea of modern culture, they modeled that idea on Britain's imperial command of the sea. Instead of locating the culture idea's beginnings in the dynamic between the country and the city, Samuel Baker insists on taking into account the significance of water for that idea's development. For the Roman...

The essays in this collection acknowledge the rich Gothic tradition in Asian narratives that deal with themes of the fantastic, the macabre, and the spectral. Through close analyses of Asian works using the theoretical framework outlined by Gothic criticism, these essays seek to expand the notion of the Gothic to include several popular Asian works.Broadly divided into essays on postcolonial Asian Gothic, Asian-American Gothic, and the Gothic writings of specific Asian nations, this volume cover...

This electronic version has been made available under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-ND) open access license. The gothic novel in Ireland, c. 1760-1829 offers a compelling account of the development of gothic literature in late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth century Ireland. Countering traditional scholarly views of the 'rise' of 'the gothic novel' on the one hand, and, on the other, Irish Romantic literature, this study persuasively re-integrates a body of now overlooked works into the history of t...

This book traces the development of literary poetics after postmodernism and outlines the most important features of what is defined here as "post-postmodernism". This new literary form simultaneously recovers the characteristics of the traditional novel and abandons the ironic approach of postmodernism, while also retaining some postmodern narrative devices such as autofiction and metafiction. To render the global dimension of this phenomenon, this book focuses on the theme of the Second World...

In Romantic Aversions J. Douglas Kneale explicates the "double gesture" in the repression of the classical tradition by focusing on its rhetorical afterlife in the literary styles of Wordsworth and Coleridge. He provides new interpretations of both canonical and non-canonical texts and explores aspects of Wordsworth's and Coleridge's manuscripts and poems previously overlooked by scholars. Kneale combines original, close readings with the larger sweep of genre study to reveal new and unexpected...

Black Neo-Victoriana is the first book-length study on contemporary re-imaginations of Blackness in the long nineteenth century. Located at the intersections of postcolonial studies, Black studies, and neo-Victorian criticism, this interdisciplinary collection engages with the global trend to reimagine and rewrite Black Victorian subjectivities that have been continually marginalised in both historical and cultural discourses. Contributions cover a range of media, from novels and drama to film,...