The first multi-disciplinary scholarly consideration of the Victorian Gothic These 14 chapters, each written by an acknowledged expert in the field, provide an invaluable insight into the complex and various Gothic forms of the nineteenth century. Covering a range of diverse contexts, the chapters focus on science, medicine, Queer theory, imperialism, nationalism, and gender. Together with further chapters on the ghost story, realism, the fin de sic e, pulp fictions, sensation fiction, and the Victorian way of death, the Companion provides the most complete overview of the Victorian Gothic to date.The book is an essential resource for students and scholars working on the Gothic, Victorian literature and culture, and critical theory.Key Features*First multi-authored thorough exploration of the Victorian Gothic*Original research in all chapters*Sets the agenda for future scholarship in the field*Pedagogically awareKey WordsVictorian, Gothic, Science, Gender, Nationalism, Death, Supernatural, Ghost, Death

'He was a man of fairly firm fibre, but there was something in this sudden, uncontrollable shriek of horror which chilled his blood and pringled in his skin. Coming in such a place and at such an hour, it brought a thousand fantastic possibilities into his head...' The Victorian fin de siècle: the era of Decadence, The Yellow Book, the New Woman, the scandalous Oscar Wilde, the Empire on which the sun never set. This heady brew was caught nowhere better than in the revival of the Gothic tale in the late Victorian age, where the undead walked and evil curses, foul murder, doomed inheritance and sexual menace played on the stretched nerves of the new mass readerships. This anthology collects together some of the most famous examples of the Gothic tale in the 1890s, with stories by Arthur Conan Doyle, Vernon Lee, Henry James and Arthur Machen, as well as some lesser known yet superbly chilling tales from the era. The introduction explores the many reasons for the Gothic revival, and how it spoke to the anxieties of the moment. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

To what extent did the Gothic haunt the nineteenth century? Victorian Gothic seeks to answer this as it introduces the reader to a timely revision of notions of the Gothic in all its manifestations. The Gothic is found to haunt all aspects of Victorian literature and culture. Moreover, Victorian Gothic connects its disparate areas of research in returning repeatedly to the question of the constitution of the subject, in a study of the Victorians from the 1830s to the 1890s.

Queer Others in Victorian Gothic: Transgressing Monstrosity explores the intersections of Gothic, cultural, gender, queer, socio-economic and postcolonial theories in nineteenth-century British representations of sexuality, gender, class and race. From mid-century authors like Wilkie Collins and Elizabeth Gaskell to fin-de-siecle writers such as J. Sheridan Le Fanu, Florence Marryat and Vernon Lee, this study examines the ways that these Victorian writers utilized gothic horror as a proverbial 'safe space' in which to grapple with taboo social and cultural issues. This work simultaneously explores our current assumptions about a Victorian culture that was monolithic in its disdain for those who were 'other'.

Gothic as a form of fiction-making has played a major role in Western culture since the late eighteenth century. In this volume, fourteen world-class experts on the Gothic provide thorough and revealing accounts of this haunting-to-horrifying type of fiction from the 1760s (the decade of The Castle of Otranto, the first so-called 'Gothic story') to the end of the twentieth century (an era haunted by filmed and computerized Gothic simulations). Along the way, these essays explore the connections of Gothic fictions to political and industrial revolutions, the realistic novel, the theatre, Romantic and post-Romantic poetry, nationalism and racism from Europe to America, colonized and post-colonial populations, the rise of film and other visual technologies, the struggles between 'high' and 'popular' culture, changing psychological attitudes towards human identity, gender and sexuality, and the obscure lines between life and death, sanity and madness. The volume also includes a chronology and guides to further reading.

A multi-disciplinary scholarly consideration of the Victorian Gothic These 14 chapters, each written by an acknowledged expert in the field, provide an invaluable insight into the complex and various Gothic forms of the nineteenth century. Covering a range of diverse contexts, the chapters focus on science, medicine, Queer theory, imperialism, nationalism, and gender. Together with further chapters on the ghost story, realism, the fin de siecle, pulp fictions, sensation fiction, and the Victorian way of death, the Companion provides a thorough-going overview of the Victorian Gothic. An essential resource for students and scholars working on the Gothic, Victorian literature and culture, and critical theory. Key Features * First multi-authored thorough exploration of the Victorian Gothic * Original research in all chapters * Sets the agenda for future scholarship in the field * Pedagogically awareKey WordsVictorian, Gothic, Science, Gender, Nationalism, Death, Supernatural, Ghost, Death

Victorian Hauntings asks its reader to consider the following questions: What does it mean to read or write with ghosts, or to suggest that acts of reading or writing are haunted? In what ways can authors in the nineteenth century be read so as to acknowledge the various phantom effects which return within their texts? In what ways do the traces of such "ghost writing" surface in the works of Dickens, Tennyson, Eliot and Hardy? How does the work of spectrality, revenance and the uncanny transform materially both the forms of the literary in the Victorian era and our reception of it today? Beginning with an expoloration of matters of haunting, the uncanny, the gothic and the spectral, Julian Wolfreys traces the ghostly resonances at work in Victorian writing and how such persistence addresses isues of memory and responsibility which haunt the work of reading. 'Taking the familiar genre of the Gothic as a point of departure and revisiting it through Derridean theory, Wolfreys' book, the first application of "hauntology" to the domain of Victorian Studies is a remarkable achievement. Wolfreys never reduces reading to instrumentality but remains alert to all the potentialities of the texts he reads with a great attention to their idiosyncrasies. Victorian Hauntings should bring a new tone to Victorian Studies, this clever book is quite perfect.' - Jean Michel Rabate, Professor of English, University of Pennsylvania 'You'd have to be dead to know more about ghosts than Julian Wolfreys.' - Martin McQuillan, University of Leeds