British Identities, Heroic Nationalisms, and the Gothic Novel, 1764-1824 considers three interlocking developments of this period: the emergence of the Gothic novel at a time when national upheavals required the construction of a new nationalist identity, the Gothic novel's redefinition of heroes and heroism in that nationalist debate, and changes within class and gender as well as audience and author relations. The scope of this study extends beyond the confines of the novel proper to include chapbooks and illustrated redactions.

This title offers a detailed yet accessible introduction to classic British Gothic literature and the popular sub-category of the Female Gothic designed for the student reader. Works by such classic Gothic authors as Horace Walpole, Matthew Lewis, Ann Radcliffe, William Godwin, and Mary Shelley are examined against the backdrop of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British social and political history and significant intellectual/cultural developments. Identification and interpretation of the Gothic’s variously reconfigured major motifs and conventions is provided alongside suggestions for further critical reading, a timeline of notable Gothic-related publications, and consideration of various theoretical approaches.

Anti-Semitism and British Gothic Literature examines the Gothic's engagement with the Jewish Question and British national identity over the course of a century. Beginning with an exploration of Jewish demonology from the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment, Davison interprets the changing significance of the trans-national Wandering Jew in classic Gothic fiction who later migrates into Victorian realism. What emerges is the elucidation of an anti-Semitic 'spectropoetics' that convey how the spectres of Jewish difference and Jewish assimilation haunt British literature.

Fascination with the dark and death threats are now accepted features of contemporary fantasy and fantastic fictions for young readers. These go back to the early gothic genre in which child characters were extensively used by authors. The aim of this book is to rediscover the children in their work.

This book is about the manifestations and explorations of the heroic in narrative literature since around 1800. It traces the most important stages of this representation but also includes strands that have been marginalised or silenced in a dominant masculine and higher-class framework - the studies include explorations of female versions of the heroic, and they consider working-class and ethnic perspectives. The chapters in this volume each focus on a prominent conjuncture of texts, histories and approaches to the heroic. Taken together, they present an overview of the ‘literary heroic’ in fiction since the late eighteenth century.

This book is the first full-length theoretical and historical study of the relation between early Gothic fiction and an emerging modern rule of law. The work identifies not only a political and cultural, but also an ontological relation between what critics have conceptualized as 'Gothic' and the nature and function of modern juridical power.

The Gothic began as a designation for barbarian tribes, was associated with the cathedrals of the High Middle Ages, was used to describe a marginalized literature in the late eighteenth century, and continues today in a variety of forms (literature, film, graphic novel, video games, and other narrative and artistic forms). Unlike other recent books in the field that focus on certain aspects of the Gothic, this work directs researchers to seminal and significant resources on all of its aspects. Annotations will help researchers determine what materials best suit their needs. A Research Guide to Gothic Literature in English covers Gothic cultural artifacts such as literature, film, graphic novels, and videogames. This authoritative guide equips researchers with valuable recent information about noteworthy resources that they can use to study the Gothic effectively and thoroughly.

An exploration of Gothic literature from its origins in Horace Walpole’s 1764 classic The Castle of Otranto, through Romantic and Victorian Gothic to modernist and postmodernist takes on the form. The volume surveys key debates such as Female Gothic, the Gothic narrator and nation and empire, and focuses on a wide range of texts including The Mysteries of Udolpho, Frankenstein, Jane Eyre, Dracula, The Magic Toyshop and The Shining.

This book explores the complex relationship between British modernism and the Gothic tradition over several centuries of modern literary and cultural history. Illuminating the blind spots of Gothic criticism and expanding the range of cultural material that falls under the banner of this tradition, Daniel Darvay focuses on how late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century British writers transform the artifice of Gothic ruins into building blocks for a distinctively modernist architecture of questions, concerns, images, and arguments. To make this argument, Darvay takes readers back to early exemplars of the genre thematically rooted in the English Reformation, tracing it through significant Victorian transformations to finally the modernist period. Through writers such as Oscar Wilde, Joseph Conrad, Virginia Woolf, E. M. Forster, and D. H. Lawrence, this book ultimately expands the boundaries of the Gothic genre and provides a fresh, new approach to better understanding the modernist movement.

Provides a new account of the emergence of Irish gothic fiction in mid-eighteenth century This book provides a robustly theorised and thoroughly historicised account of the 'beginnings' of Irish gothic fiction, maps the theoretical terrain covered by other critics, and puts forward a new history of the emergence of the genre in Ireland. The main argument the book makes is that the Irish gothic should be read in the context of the split in Irish Anglican public opinion that opened in the 1750s, and seen as a fictional instrument of liberal Anglican opinion in a changing political landscape. By providing a fully historicized account of the beginnings of the genre in Ireland, the book also addresses the theoretical controversies that have bedevilled discussion of the Irish gothic in the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s. The book gives ample space to the critical debate, and rigorously defends a reading of the Irish gothic as an Anglican, Patriot tradition. This reading demonstrates the connections between little-known Irish gothic fictions of the mid-eighteenth century (The Adventures of Miss Sophia Berkley and Longsword), and the Irish gothic tradition more generally, and also the gothic as a genre of global significance.