"His foot struck against something, he stumbled, and had nearly fallen; he stooped to examine what it was, and his hand rested on the face of a human being, cold, putrid, and clammy " Young Edgar's father, the noble Baron Fitz-Elmar, has been mysteriously slain, and his uncle, the scheming Sir Armine, rules in his place. Determined to retain power, Armine will stop at nothing to destroy Edgar, who stands to inherit the castle. Now Edgar must flee his tyrannical uncle and outrun the murderous army of assassins sent to kill him. His flight will lead him, on a dark and stormy night, to a ruined priory, where he will discover the horrible truth behind his father's untimely end. A gothicized retelling of Hamlet, and heavily influenced by the tragedies of Shakespeare and the Gothic romances of Walpole and Radcliffe, The Phantom of the Castle was the first of Richard Sickelmore's Gothic novels. This edition, the first since its initial publication in 1798, includes a new introduction, notes, and the complete text of contemporary reviews.

In Gothic Shakespeares, Shakespeare is considered alongside major Gothic texts and writers - from Horace Walpole, Ann Radcliffe, Matthew Lewis and Mary Shelley, up to and including contemporary Gothic fiction and horror film. This volume offers a highly original and truly provocative account of Gothic reformulations of Shakespeare, and Shakespeare’s significance to the Gothic.

Considers the ways ghost stories appeal to our uneasy relationship with conventional good senseWhat do they want, the ghosts that, even in the age of science, still haunt our storytelling? Catherine Belsey's answer to the question traces Gothic writing and tales of the uncanny from the ancient past to the present - from Homer and the Icelandic sagas to Lincoln in the Bardo. Taking Shakespeare's Ghost in Hamlet as a turning point in the history of the genre, she uncovers the old stories the play relies on, as well as its influence on later writing. This ghostly trail is vividly charted through accredited records of apparitions and fiction by such writers as Ann Radcliffe, Washington Irving, Emily Bront Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry James, M. R. James and Susan Hill. In recent blockbusting movies, too, ghost stories bring us fragments of news from the unknown. Traces examples of ghost stories from Homer to the present dayDescribes the aspects of storytelling designed to involve readersIncludes stories of attested apparitions, as well as fiction by a wide range of both canonical and popular authors

The Captive of the Castle of Sennaar is a utopian novel in two parts. In this scholarly edition, G.E. Bentley, Jr, places George Cumberland's late eighteenth-century work among the earliest historical novels in English and identifies it as a rare example of the "Romantic novel." He shows that while each part of the work adopts a very different form of utopia, the two utopias complement and modify one another. He also shows the work to be unusual for the sexual and political freedom encouraged and the Christian fundamentalism advocated, as well as for its setting, in lands never visited by Europeans at the time of writing.