This book is the first study of how ‘weird fiction’ emerged from Victorian supernatural literature, abandoning the more conventional Gothic horrors of the past for the contemporary weird tale. It investigates the careers and fiction of a range of the British writers who inspired H. P. Lovecraft, such as Arthur Machen, M. P. Shiel, and John Buchan, to shed light on the tensions between ‘literary’ and ‘genre’ fiction that continue to this day. Weird Fiction in Britain 1880–1939 focuses on the key literary and cultural contexts of weird fiction of the period, including Decadence, paganism, and the occult, and discusses how these later impacted on the seminal American pulp magazine Weird Tales. This ground-breaking book will appeal to scholars of weird, horror and Gothic fiction, genre studies, Decadence, popular fiction, the occult, and Fin-de-Siècle cultural history.

This book explores how nineteenth-century science stimulated the emergence of weird tales at the fin de siècle, and examines weird fiction by British writers who preceded and influenced H. P. Lovecraft, the most famous author of weird fiction. From laboratory experiments, thermodynamics, and Darwinian evolutionary theory to psychology, Theosophy, and the ‘new’ physics of atoms and forces, science illuminated supernatural realms with rational theories and practices. Changing scientific philosophies and questioning of traditional positivism produced new ways of knowing the world—fertile borderlands for fictional as well as real-world scientists to explore. Reading Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) as an inaugural weird tale, the author goes on to analyse stories by Arthur Machen, Edith Nesbit, H. G. Wells, William Hope Hodgson, E. and H. Heron, and Algernon Blackwood to show how this radical fantasy mode can be scientific, and how sciences themselves were often already weird.

“Simply put, there is absolutely nothing on the market with the range of ambition of this strikingly eclectic collection of essays. Not only is it impossible to imagine a more comprehensive view of the subject, most readers – even specialists in the subject – will find that there are elements of the Gothic genre here of which they were previously unaware.” - Barry Forshaw, Author of British Gothic Cinema and Sex and Film The Palgrave Handbook of Contemporary Gothic is the most comprehensive compendium of analytic essays on the modern Gothic now available, covering the vast and highly significant period from 1918 to 2019. The Gothic sensibility, over 200 years old, embraces its dark past whilst anticipating the future. From demons and monsters to post- apocalyptic fears and ecological fantasies, Gothic is thriving as never before in the arts and in popular culture. This volume is made up of 62 comprehensive chapters with notes and extended bibliographies contributed by scholars from around the world. The chapters are written not only for those engaged in academic research but also to be accessible to students and dedicated followers of the genre. Each chapter is packed with analysis of the Gothic in both theory and practice, as the genre has mutated and spread over the last hundred years. Starting in 1918 with the impact of film on the genre's development, and moving through its many and varied international incarnations, each chapter chronicles the history of the gothic milieu from the movies to gaming platforms and internet memes, television and theatre. The volume also looks at how Gothic intersects with fashion, music and popular culture: a multi-layered, multi-ethnic, even a trans-gendered experience as we move into the twenty first century.

The first dedicated exploration of the short fiction of Shirley Jackson for three decades, this volume takes an in-depth look at the themes and legacies of her 200-plus short stories. Recognized as the mother of contemporary horror, scholars from across the globe, and from a range of different disciplinary backgrounds, dig into the lasting impact of her work in light of its increasing relevance to contemporary critical preoccupations and the re-release of Jackson's work in 2016. Offering new methodologies to study her work, this volume calls upon ideas of intertextuality, ecocriticism and psychoanalysis to examine a broad range of themes from national identity, race, gender and class to domesticity, the occult, selfhood and mental illness. With consideration of her blockbuster works alongside later works that received much less critical attention, Shirley Jackson's Dark Tales promises a rich and dynamic expansion on previous scholarship of Jackson's oeuvre, both bringing her writing into the contemporary conversation, and ensuring her place in the canon of Horror fiction.

A landmark edition of Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu's shorter fiction, the form at which he most excelled

Decadence and Orientalism in England and Germany, 1880-1920 examines the Orientalist portrayal of Middle Eastern cultures in Decadent Literatures in England and Germany at the turn of the century. This book argues that the role of Orientalism in literary Decadence uniquely exposes its paradoxical engagement with other cultures. In bringing together two fin-de-siècle European literatures, this comparative study makes a case for the transnational, if not imperial, nature of Decadence. The East emerges as an 'indispensable' mediator between various versions of European Decadence. The book examines the role of the East with specific reference to selected English and German authors: starting from Oscar Wilde's Victorian vision of Egypt and Arthur Symons's and Violet Fane's image of Constantinople, it moves to Paul Scheerbart's and Else Lasker-Schüler's Decadent Babylon and Assyria and concludes by turning to Stefan George's exclusion of the East from his poetic practice. The geographical reach of the East focuses on regions of the Eastern Mediterranean and Northern Africa. The cultural translation of specifically the Middle East into different European national contexts gains new—sometimes oppositional—meanings, avoiding a one-sided representation of both the East and the two national literatures that absorbed it. In arguing for a Decadent cosmopolitanism as a model of heterogeneous inclusivity that reaches beyond the binaries established by Edward Said's Orientalism, the present book brings twenty-first century theories of cosmopolitanism into dialogue with art history and literature to uncover striking synergies and interdependences between the different manifestations of Decadence in England and Germany.

While the undisputed heyday of folk horror was Britain in the 1960s and 1970s, the genre has not only a rich cinematic and literary prehistory, but directors and novelists around the world have also been reinventing folk horror for the contemporary moment. This study sets out to rethink the assumptions that have guided critical writing on the genre in the face of such expansions, with chapters exploring a range of subjects from the fiction of E. F. Benson to Scooby-Doo, video games, and community engagement with the Lancashire witches. In looking beyond Britain, the essays collected here extend folk horror’s geographic terrain to map new conceptualisations of the genre now seen emerging from Italy, Ukraine, Thailand, Mexico and the Appalachian region of the US.

By the early 1830s the old school of Gothic literature was exhausted. Late Romanticism, emphasising as it did the uncertainties of personality and imagination, gave it a new lease of life. Gothic—the literature of disturbance and uncertainty—now produced works that reflected domestic fears, sexual crimes, drug filled hallucinations, the terrible secrets of middle class marriage, imperial horror at alien invasion, occult demonism and the insanity of psychopaths. It was from the 1830s onwards that the old gothic castle gave way to the country house drawing room, the dungeon was displaced by the sewers of the city and the villains of early novels became the familiar figures of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Dracula, Dorian Grey and Jack the Ripper. After the death of Prince Albert (1861), the Gothic became darker, more morbid, obsessed with demonic lovers, blood sucking ghouls, blood stained murderers and deranged doctors. Whilst the gothic architecture of the Houses of Parliament and the new Puginesque churches upheld a Victorian ideal of sobriety, Christianity and imperial destiny, Gothic literature filed these new spaces with a dread that spread like a plague to America, France, Germany and even Russia. From 1830 to 1914, the period covered by this volume, we saw the emergence of the greats of Gothic literature and the supernatural from Edgar Allan Poe to Emily Bronte, from Sheridan Le Fanu to Bram Stoker and Robert Louis Stevenson. Contributors also examine the fin-de-siècle dreamers of decadence such as Arthur Machen, M P Shiel and Vernon Lee and their obsession with the occult, folklore, spiritualism, revenants, ghostly apparitions and cosmic annihilation. This volume explores the period through the prism of architectural history, urban studies, feminism, 'hauntology' and much more. 'Horror', as Poe teaches us, 'is the soul of the plot'.

How is decadence being staged today – as a practice, issue, pejorative, and as a site of pleasure? Where might we find it, why might we look for it, and who is decadence for? This book is the first monographic study of decadence in theatre and performance. Adam Alston makes a passionate case for the contemporary relevance of decadence in the thick of a resurgent culture war by focusing on its antithetical relationship to capitalist-led growth, progress, and intensified productivity. He argues that the qualities used to disparage the study and practice of theatre and performance are the very things we should embrace in celebrating their value – namely, their spectacular uselessness, wastefulness, outmodedness, and abundant potential for producing forms of creativity that flow away from the ends and excesses of capitalism. Alston covers an eclectic range of examples by Julia Bardsley (UK), Hasard Le Sin (Finland), jaamil olawale kosoko (USA), Toco Nikaido (Japan), Martin O'Brien (UK), Toshiki Okada (Japan), Marcel·lí Antúnez Roca (Spain), Normandy Sherwood (USA), The Uhuruverse (USA), Nia O. Witherspoon (USA), and Wunderbaum (Netherlands). Expect ruminations on monstrous scenographies, catatonic choreographies, turbo-charged freneticism, visions of the apocalypse – and what might lie in its wake.

This volume is a study of human entanglements with Nature as seen through the mode of haunting. As an interruption of the present by the past, haunting can express contemporary anxieties concerning our involvement in the transformation of natural environments and their ecosystems, and our complicity in their collapse. It can also express a much-needed sense of continuity and relationality. The complexity of the question—who and what gets to be called human with respect to the nonhuman—is reflected in these collected chapters, which, in their analysis of cinematic and literary representations of sentient Nature within the traditional gothic trope of haunting, bring together history, race, postcolonialism, and feminism with ecocriticism and media studies. Given the growing demand for narratives expressing our troubled relationship with Nature, it is imperative to analyze this contested ground. “Chapter 6” is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.