The Palgrave Handbook of Steam Age Gothic

Description

By the early 1830s the old school of Gothic literature was exhausted. Late Romanticism, emphasising as it did the uncertainties of personality and imagination, gave it a new lease of life. Gothic―the literature of disturbance and uncertainty―now produced works that reflected domestic fears, sexual crimes, drug filled hallucinations, the terrible secrets of middle class marriage, imperial horror at alien invasion, occult demonism and the insanity of psychopaths. It was from the 1830s onwards that the old gothic castle gave way to the country house drawing room, the dungeon was displaced by the sewers of the city and the villains of early novels became the familiar figures of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Dracula, Dorian Grey and Jack the Ripper. After the death of Prince Albert (1861), the Gothic became darker, more morbid, obsessed with demonic lovers, blood sucking ghouls, blood stained murderers and deranged doctors. Whilst the gothic architecture of the Houses of Parliament and the new Puginesque churches upheld a Victorian ideal of sobriety, Christianity and imperial destiny, Gothic literature filed these new spaces with a dread that spread like a plague to America, France, Germany and even Russia. From 1830 to 1914, the period covered by this volume, we saw the emergence of the greats of Gothic literature and the supernatural from Edgar Allan Poe to Emily Bronte, from Sheridan Le Fanu to Bram Stoker and Robert Louis Stevenson. Contributors also examine the fin-de-siècle dreamers of decadence such as Arthur Machen, M P Shiel and Vernon Lee and their obsession with the occult, folklore, spiritualism, revenants, ghostly apparitions and cosmic annihilation. This volume explores the period through the prism of architectural history, urban studies, feminism, 'hauntology' and much more. 'Horror', as Poe teaches us, 'is the soul of the plot'.   Acknowledgements Contents List of Figures Introduction: The Black Shadow of Doom Bibliography Precursor Pulp Chapbooks, Pamphlets, and Forgotten Horrors Bibliography Penny Dreadfuls and Spring-heeled Jack Bibliography Subterranean Spaces in the Penny Dreadful Bibliography Gothic for a New Age The Horrors of Edgar Allan Poe Bibliography Edward Bulwer Lytton and Poisoned Prose Bibliography Challenging Genre Definitions in Jane Eyre Bibliography Journeys Through the English Haunted House Bibliography Gothic Spaces Haunted Space and Gender Performance in the Ghost Stories of Mary Elizabeth Braddon Bibliography Algernon Blackwood’s Storytelling and the Horrors of Space Bibliography National Gothic The Failed Heroism of Ludwig II of Bavaria Bibliography Terror in Colonial Australian Literature Bibliography The Short Stories of Fitz-James O’Brien Bibliography The Oriental World of Egyptian Gothic Bibliography Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu and Ireland Bibliography The Rise of Terror in the Grimms’ Fairy Tales Bibliography Domestic Gothic Chills Haunted Domesticity in Late-Victorian Women’s Writing Bibliography Food, Eating, Appetite and Otherness Bibliography The Plant, the Mother and the Other in Ambrose Bierce’s Fiction Works Cited An Edwardian Lodging on the Victorian Horror Threshold Bibliography Technology and Gothic Fears Nineteenth-Century Office Chills Bibliography Typewriters, Blood and Media in Dracula Bibliography Visual Gothic Culture Global Pre-Raphaelitism and the Morbid Composition of Photography Cinematic Darkness Bibliography Gothic Drama and the Uncanny Stage Bibliography Spirituality, Theology and the Gothic Victorian Gardens of Death Bibliography Science and the Supernatural: Spiritualism, Psychical Research and Pseudo-Science in the Nineteenth Century Bibliography Theological Readings of the Victorian Ghost Story Bibliography Women Writers and the Theosophical Tale of Terror Bibliography The Haunted Regions of Sabine Baring-Gould Bibliography The Cult of Pan in Nineteenth-Century Literature Bibliography Joris-Karl Huysmans, Decadence, Satanism and Catholicism Bibliography The Supernatural Fourth Dimension in Lucas Malet’s The Carissima and The Gateless Barrier Bibliography Victorian Vampires The Steam Age Vampire Bibliography Bram Stoker’s Dracula: The Transformation of Tradition Bibliography Uncanny Humans Freaks and the Victorian Imagination Bibliography Victorian Stage Magic, Adventure and the Mutilated Body Bibliography The Spectral Child Bibliography Gothic Music Eerie Harmonies, Ghostly Melodies, Uncanny Symphonies Bibliography Wagner, the Flying Dutchman, and the Schauerroman Bibliography Decadent Gothic Aestheticism and Decadence in Britain and France Bibliography Oscar Wilde and The Picture of Dorian Gray Bibliography Edwardian Thrills Golf and Masculinity in M. R. James Bibliography Algernon Blackwood and the Classic Weird Tale Bibliography Shades of Sail: Edwardian Nautical Hauntings Bibliography List of Contributors Index