Gothic Fiction

'...for those who want to deepen their appreciation of the Gothic novel Wright is an articulate and intelligent guide to the critical minefield, digging up the most fascinating and representative texts and marshalling their arguments in a way that makes them accessible to the lay readers, with plentiful insights into the nature of supernatural fiction and its appeal.' - Peter Tennant, Black Static '...the selection and organisation of an impressively wide and relevant range of sources ... and the critical commentaries that accompany them mark this out as an invaluable aid to researching and teaching the Gothic.' - Sue Chaplin, BARS Bulletin

Angela Wright assembles some of the most important critical writings about Romantic Gothic literature since its inception to the present day. This guide begins by charting the moral and political panic provoked by Gothic's increasing popularity in the 1790s, and then examines the genre's recuperation as a serious area of literary study.What is the Gothic? Few literary genres have attracted so much praise and critical disdain simultaneously. This Guide returns to the Gothic novel's first wave of popularity, between 1764 and 1820, to explore and analyse the full range of contradictory responses that the Gothic evoked. Angela Wright appraises the key criticism surrounding the Gothic fiction of this period, from eighteenth-century accounts to present-day commentaries. Adopting an easy-to-follow thematic approach, the Guide examines:

- contemporary criticism of the Gothic
- the aesthetics of terror and horror
- the influence of the French Revolution
- religion, nationalism and the Gothic
- the relationship between psychoanalysis and the Gothic
- the relationship between gender and the Gothic.

Concise and authoritative, this indispensable Guide provides an overview of Gothic criticism and covers the work of a variety of well-known Gothic writers, such as Horace Walpole, Ann Radcliffe, Matthew Lewis and many others.