The History of Gothic Fiction

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 intere