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.

The series provides a comprehensive introduction to the history of Gothic literature and to a variety of critical and theoretical approaches.

Examines how themes and trends associated with the early Gothic novels were diffused in many genres in the Victorian period, including the ghost story, the detective story and the adventure story.

Offers an introduction to British Gothic literature. This book examines works by Gothic authors such as Horace Walpole, Matthew Lewis, Ann Radcliffe, William Godwin and Mary Shelley against the backdrop of eighteenth-and-nineteenth-century British social and political history.

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.

The Gothic Ideology argues that in order to modernize and secularize, the British Protestant imaginary needed an 'other' against which it could define itself as a culture and a nation with distinct boundaries. The 'Gothic ideology' is identified as an intense religious anxiety, produced by the aftershocks of the Protestant reformation, the Catholic Counter-Reformation, and the dynastic upheavals produced by both events in England, Germany, and France, and was played out in hundreds of Gothic texts published throughout Europe between the mid-eighteenth century and 1880. This book is the first to read the Gothic ideology through the historical context of both King Henry VIII's dissolution of the monasteries and the extensive French anti-clerical and pornographic works that were well-known to Horace Walpole and Matthew Lewis. The book argues that Gothic was thoroughly invested in a crude form of anti-Catholicism that fed lower class prejudices against the passage of a variety of Catholic Relief Acts that had been pending in Parliament since 1788 and finally passed in 1829.