Romantic Gothic: An Edinburgh Companion

Description

Romantic Gothic: An Edinburgh Companion provides a thorough critical, textual and historical account of the Gothic aesthetic as manifested across a wide range of Romantic-era literary texts, from the adumbrations of the Gothic mode in the proto-Romantic poetry of the 1740s, through to the 'belated' Gothic fictions of the late 1820s. Self-consciously breaching, like Hume and Gamer before it, the critical divide between what literary history has subsequently differentiated as the 'Gothic' and the 'Romantic', this collection of 17 newly commissioned chapters seeks to draw attention to what G. R. Thompson in 1947 termed 'dark Romanticism', that is, that prominent strain in late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century British, American and European literature in which the distinction between the popular, low-cultural reaches of the Gothic and the 'High' Romantic aesthetics of more canonical figures is all but erased. Contents 1. Gothic and Romantic: An Historical Overview1. Gothic and Romantic: An Historical Overview Part I Gothic Modes and Forms 2. Graveyard Writing and the Rise of the Gothic 3. Gothic Romance 4. The Gothic Stage 5. Gothic Poetry and First-Generation Romanticism 6. Gothic and Second-Generation Romanticism 7. Political Gothic Fictio 8. Shorter Gothic Fictions 9. Oriental Gothic 10. Gothic Parody Part II National and International Borders 11. Gothic Borders: Scotland, Ireland and Wales 12. Gothic Travels 13. The Romantic and the Gothic in Europe 14. American Gothic Passages PART III Reading the Romantic Gothic 15. Gothic and the Language of Terror 16. Gothic Science 17. Gender and Sexuality in Gothic Romanticism 18. Gothic Forms of Time 19. Gothic Theology Notes on Contributors Index