Kooperativer Bibliotheksverbund

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Format: 1 online resource (224 p.) : , 10 Plates, black & white

ISBN: 9781474497107

Content: GBS_insertPreviewButtonPopup('ISBN:9780748611959);The History of Gothic Fiction debates the rise of the genre from its origins in the late eighteenth-century novel through nineteenth-century fictions of tyrants, monsters, conspirators and vampires to the twentieth-century zombie film.Approaching key novels by authors such as Walpole (The Castle of Otranto), Radcliffe (The Romance of the Forest and The Mysteries of Udolpho), Austen (Northanger Abbey), Wollstonecraft (The Wrongs of Woman), Lewis (The Monk), Shelley (Frankenstein), Stoker (Dracula) and Halperin (White Zombie), the argument proceeds on historicist principles, analysing the peculiar tone of these fictions and uncovering themes of credulity and reason, secrecy and enlightenment, tyranny and libertinism, sexuality and gender, race and miscegenation. The final chapters on the vampire and the zombie examine how the un-dead of gothic terror are embedded in an argument from history.Written with an undergraduate audience in mind, this text offers a synthesis of the main topics of Gothic interest and clearly argued summaries of critical debate. It signals its difference from popular psychoanalytic readings of Gothic and argues instead for a more complex, multilayered approach via an historicist reading of Gothic fiction. Illustrated with ten black and white plates and including up-to-date bibliographies, this will be an ideal text for all those with an interest in the Gothic.Key Featureswritten with an undergraduate audience in mindcovers topics such as vampires, zombies, tyrants, banditti and demon-loversoffers clearly argued summaries of critical debate"

Note: Frontmatter -- , Contents -- , Acknowledgements -- , List of illustrations -- , Prologue: The history of gothic fiction -- , 1. History and the gothic novel -- , I. What’s gothic about the gothic novel? -- , II. Reading gothic histories: Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto Patriotism, Wilkes and the gothic -- , 2. Female gothic and the secret terrors of sensibility -- , I. Radcliffe and the politics of female sensibility -- , II. Radcliffe and the politics of masculine sensibility -- , III. Gothic radicals: Wollstonecraft’s The Wrongs of Woman -- , 3. Revolution and libertinism in the gothic novel -- , I. Compositional politics of The Monk -- , II. Lewis and the French Revolutionary Wars -- , III. Publication and the politics of censorship -- , 4. Science, conspiracy and the gothic enlightenment -- , I. Charles Brockden Brown: conspiracy, enlightenment and the supernatural explained -- , II. Fictions of science in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein Alchemy and modern science -- , 5. Vampires, credulity and reason -- , I. The 1730s vampire controversy -- , II. Romance vampires and the romantic poets -- , III. History, the vampire and Dracula -- , 6. Zombies and the occultation of slavery -- , I. Slavery and the zombie -- , II. Twentieth-century gothic and the zombies of modernity -- , III. The occultation of miscegenation and slavery in the zombie film -- , Select bibliography of gothic resources -- , Index , In English.

Language: English

DOI: 10.1515/9781474497107

URL: https://doi.org/10.1515/9781474497107

URL: https://www.degruyter.com/isbn/9781474497107

URL: https://doi.org/10.1515/9781474497107

URL: https://www.degruyter.com/isbn/9781474497107