Gothick Origins and Innovations

Book excerpt: Gothic: Origins and Innovations brings together nineteen papers from an international group of scholars currently researching in the field of the Gothic which take a fresh, contemporary look at the tradition from its eighteenth-century inception to the twentieth century. Topics and authors include the current usage and definition of the term 'Gothic'; the eighteenth-century rise of the genre; the Sublime; Victorian sensation fiction, and authors such as Coleridge, Mary Shelly, Maturin, LeFanu, Washington Irving, Robert Louis Stevenson, Bram Stoker, John Neale, Jack London, Herman Melville, Dickens, Henry James and the movie version of his Turn of the Screw, The Innocents. This wide-ranging set of discussions brings to the subject a new set of perspectives, revising standard accounts of the origins of the genre and extending the historical and cultural contexts into which traditional literary history has tended to confine the subject. Framed by a lively and challenging introduction, the collection brings to bear a full range of contemporary critical instruments, approaches, and interdisciplinary languages, ranging from the new vocabularies of the socio-cultural to the latest debates in the psychoanalytic field. It provides a stimulating introduction to recent thinking about the Gothic.