This handbook provides a comprehensive overview of research on the
Gothic Revival. The Gothic Revival was based on emotion rather than
reason and when Horace Walpole created Strawberry Hill House, a
gleaming white castle on the banks of the Thames, he had to create
new words to describe the experience of gothic lifestyle.
Nevertheless, Walpole's house produced nightmares and his book The
Castle of Otranto was the first truly gothic novel, with
supernatural, sensational and Shakespearean elements challenging
the emergent fiction of social relationships. The novel's themes of
violence, tragedy, death, imprisonment, castle battlements,
dungeons, fair maidens, secrets, ghosts and prophecies led to a new
genre encompassing prose, theatre, poetry and painting, whilst
opening up a whole world of imagination for entrepreneurial female
writers such as Mary Shelley, Joanna Baillie and Ann Radcliffe,
whose immensely popular books led to the intense inner landscapes
of the Bronte sisters. Matthew Lewis's The Monk created a new
gothic: atheistic, decadent, perverse, necrophilic and hellish. The
social upheaval of the French Revolution and the emergence of the
Romantic movement with its more intense (and often) atheistic
self-absorption led the gothic into darker corners of human
experience with a greater emphasis on the inner life,
hallucination, delusion, drug addiction, mental instability,
perversion and death and the emerging science of psychology. The
intensity of the German experience led to an emphasis on doubles
and schizophrenic behaviour, ghosts, spirits, mesmerism, the occult
and hell. This volume charts the origins of this major shift in
social perceptions and completes a trilogy of Palgrave Handbooks on
the Gothic-combined they provide an exhaustive survey of current
research in Gothic studies, a go-to for students and researchers
alike.
General
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