Gothic authors and ghosts writers: THE ADVENT OF UNAUTHORIZED AUTHORSHIP IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY AMERICAN GOTHIC LITERATURE (2025)

American Gothic: Book Reviews

Journal of Popular Culture, 2010

Gothic Discourse Meets Hybridity in the United States Gothic Discourse Meets Hybridity in the United States

Gothic Literature -A Background Study on Main Elements of Horror in Gothic Fiction

Review of _The American Imperial Gothic: Popular Culture, Empire, Violence_ by Johan Hoglund

The Gothic Imagination (University of Stirling, Scotland site), 2015

Gothic and the Generation of Ideas

Literature Compass, 2007

Gothic writing has remarkable generative power: as Marshall Brown has described it, gothic is a genre with what he calls a teleology, whose "significance lies in what it enabled its future readers to see, in what arguments it provoked, and. .. in what dreams it stimulated" (xix). From a brief discussion of selected early studies of the gothic, this article moves on to consider the extraordinary development of gothic criticism from the 1970s on, when the emergence of feminist and post-structuralist criticism put gothic literature on the map in a new way. Tracing the development and imbrication of the many strands of gothic criticism yields a complex and at times paradoxical picture: gothic has been read as the most rigid and formulaic of literary forms but also as centrally engaged with the notably slippery concepts of sensibility and the sublime; as escapist and as grounded in the realities of human existence; as focused on the individual psyche and as socio-cultural critique; as commenting on class, on gender, on race; as engaged with questions of national, colonial, and post-colonial identity. The field is now so well developed that guidebooks and handbooks to both primary sources and critical approaches have emerged over the last few years to codify and make it accessible. And so the question arises: have we said all that we can about this genre or can we learn still more from it? The closing portion of this article suggests that we can, pointing to gothic and religion as an area of particular interest. Religious issues have been front and center in gothic writing from its inception, and criticism to date has opened up-but hardly exhausted-this potentially rich area of research.

Gothic Subjects: The Transformation of Individualism in American Fiction, 1790–1861 by Siân Silyn Roberts

Early American Literature, 2015

The Gothic genre: significant contribution to literary or cultural histories?

Genres such as the Gothic have often been dismissed as having no literary or cultural value, but this is not entirely true. Critic Robert Miles has argued that ‘Gothic romances echo the cultural convulsions that increasingly racked’ the period they were written in. This is not only true for Gothic novels in general, but it gains special relevance when applied to Ann Radcliffe. Her novel, The Italian, echoes cultural anxieties such as gender issues and religious tumults, constituting a solid example of how the Gothic can make a contribution to the understanding of society. The question that should be asked, therefore, is: why has the Gothic been diminished in relation to other genres? The aim of this essay is to answer this question, and to demonstrate the true importance of the Gothic genre by analysing Ann Radcliffe’s The Italian and its portrayal of religious institutions.

The Contemporary Gothic (2018)

Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature, 2018

The writings covered to by the umbrella term “Gothic” are so varied in style, thematic interests, and narrative effects that an overarching definition becomes problematic and even undesirable. The contemporary Gothic, drawing on an already fragmented and heterogenic artistic tradition, is less a genre than a vestigial type of writing that resuscitates older horrors and formulas and filters them through the echo chambers of a modern preoccupation with the social value of transgressive literature. In a century when the Gothic has once again exploded in popularity, and following a period of strong institutionalization of its study in the 1990s and 2000s, establishing some of its key modern manifestations and core concerns becomes a pressing issue. The Gothic may be fruitfully separated from horror, a genre premised on the emotional impact it seeks to have on readers, as a type of literature concerned with the legacy of the past on the present—and, more importantly, with the retrojecting of contemporary anxieties into times considered more barbaric. These have increasingly manifested in neo-Victorian fictions and in stories where settings are haunted by forgotten or repressed events but also by weird fiction, where encounters with beings and substances from unplumbed cosmic depths lead to a comparable temporal discombobulation. The intertextual mosaics of the contemporary Gothic also borrow from and recycle well-known myths and figures such as Dracula or Frankenstein’s monster in order to show their continued relevance or else to adapt their recognizable narratives to the early 21st century. Finally, the Gothic, as a type of literature that is quickly becoming defined by the cultural work it carries out and by its transnational reach, has found in monstrosity, especially in its mediation of alterity, of traumatic national pasts and of the viral nature of the digital age, a fertile ground for the proliferation of new nightmares.

Gothic Literature in America: The Nobrow Aesthetics of Murder and Madness

This article proposes that the Gothic can be considered as 'no-brow', straddling low and high brow literary projects, focusing on Edgar Allan Poe and Herman Melville as examples.

Introduction to the monograph: "Speaking the Language of the Night: Aspects of the Gothic in Selected Contemporary Novels