With careful reasoning supported by wide-ranging scholarship, this study exposes the fallacies of 'social constructionist' theories within lesbian and gay studies and makes a forceful case for the autonomy of queer identity and culture. It presents evidence that queers are part of a centuries-old history, possessing a unified historical and cultural identity. The volume reviews the fundamental historiographical issues about the nature of queer history, arguing that a new generation of queer historians will need to abandon authoritarian dogma founded upon politically-correct ideology rather than historical experience. Norton offers a clear exposition of the evidence for ancient, indigenous and pre-modern queer cultural continuity, revealing how knowledge of that history has been suppressed and censored and sets out the 'queer cultural essentialist' position on the key topics of queer history - role, identity, bisexuality, orientation, linguistics, social control, homophobia, subcultures, and kinship patterns.

Gothic Readings: The First Wave, 1764-1840 is an anthology of Gothic literature, set within the context of contemporary criticism and readers' responses. It includes selections from the major practitioners - indcluding Horace Walpole, William Beckford, Ann Radcliffe, Matthew Gregory Lewis, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Godwin, Mary Shelley, Charles Robert Maturin and Edgar Allan Poe - and many of their followers, as well as contemporary reviews, private letters and diaries, chapbooks, and anecdotes about dramatic performaces and the design of theatre sets. The volume provides representative samples of the major genres: historical Gothic, the Radcliffe school of terror, the Lewis school of horror, tragic melodrama, comic parody, supernatural poetry and ballads, book reviews and literary criticism and anti-Gothic polemic. Also covered are the major Gothic issues such as the aesthetics of the sublime, religionn and the supernatural and the influence of ancient Romance, 'hobgoblin machinery' (including vampires, spectres, orphans, the Inquisition, banditti, nuns, storms and ruined castles), and social and political themes.A general introduction reviews the major approaches to Gothic literature, and short introductions place individual selections in context. All the texts are based on first editions. The collection is suitable as a textbook for courses on the Gothic novel or on Romantic literature and will appeal to all Gothic enthusiasts. Rictor Norton is the author of Mistress of Udolpho: The Life of Ann Radcliffe.

This is the first full-scale biography of the famous Gothic novelist, Ann Radcliffe (1764-1823), author of The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), the world's first "best-seller." The author has unearthed new information about Radcliffe, and gives us a contextual picture of Radcliffe that is unlikely to be superseded. He clarifies Radcliffe's emergence from a Dissenting Unitarian, rather than a conventional Anglican, background. This discovery redraws the literary historical map to include Radcliffe within the circle of other women writers in radical Dissenting backgrounds (such as Wollstonecraft and Barbauld). Norton fully documents Radcliffe's childhood and family, investigates the rumors of her madness and her extraordinary reclusiveness, and evaluates the reasons for her probable mental breakdown. But it also constitutes a "cultural history" of a writing woman, demonstrating her place within radical culture and literary tradition, examining her crucial role in the rise of the professional woman writer. Her novels are analyzed mainly in the context of her biography and her sources, and some new dates for her posthumous work are established.