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-siecle 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'.
General
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