“The Gothic Quest - A History of the Gothic Novel” is a 1938 treatise by Montague Summers on the subject of the Gothic novel, looking at its origins, evolution, and role in contemporary literature. Augustus Montague Summers (1880 – 1948) was an English clergyman and author most famous for his studies on vampires, witches and werewolves—all of which he believed to be very much real. He also wrote the first English translation of the infamous 15th-century witch hunter's manual, the “Malleus Maleficarum”, in 1928. Contents include: “The Romantic Feeling”, “Notes to Chapter I”, “The Publishers and the Circulating Libraries”, “Notes to Chapter II”, “Influences from Abroad”, “Notes to Chapter III”, “Historical Gothic”, “Notes to Chapters IV”, “Matthew Gregory Lewis”, etc. Other notable works by this author include: “A Popular History of Witchcraft” (1937), “Witchcraft and Black Magic” (1946), and “The Physical Phenomena of Mysticism” (1947). Many vintage books such as this are becoming increasingly scarce and expensive. We are republishing this volume now in an affordable, modern, high-quality edition complete with a specially-commissioned new biography of the author.

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.