Victorian Gothic

Literary and Cultural Manifestations in the Nineteenth Century

J. Wolfreys, R. Robbins, J. Wolfreys, R. Robbins

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2000
• Print ISBN: 9781349411726, 9780333749357
• eBook ISBN: 9780230598737
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Modern Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

To what extent did the Gothic haunt the nineteenth century? Victorian Gothic seeks to answer this as it introduces the reader to a timely revision of notions of the Gothic in all its manifestations. The Gothic is found to haunt all aspects of Victorian literature and culture. Moreover, Victorian Gothic connects its disparate areas of research in returning repeatedly to the question of the constitution of the subject, in a study of the Victorians from the 1830s to the 1890s.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Notes on the Contributors
• List of Illustrations
• Preface: ‘I could a tale unfold’ or, the Promise of Gothic
• 1 ‘Designing Gourmet Children or, KIDS FOR DINNER!’
• 2 Resurrecting the Regency: Horror and Eighteenth-Century Comedy in Le Fanu’s Fiction
• 3 ‘I wants to make your flesh creep’: Notes toward a Reading of the Comic-Gothic in Dickens
• 4 Hopkins and the Gothic Body
• 5 From King Arthur to Sidonia the Sorceress: the Dual Nature of Pre-Raphaelite Mediaevalism
• 6 Mary Elizabeth Coleridge, Literary Influence and Technologies of the Uncanny
• 7 The ‘Anxious Dream’: Julia Margaret Cameron’s Gothic Perspective
• 8 Trance-Gothic, 1882–97
• 9 ‘Withered, Wrinkled, and Loathsome of Visage’: Reading the Ethics of the Soul and the Late-Victorian Gothic in The Picture of Dorian Gray
• 10 Apparitions Can Be Deceptive: Vernon Lee’s Androgynous Spectres
• 11 Gothic and Supernatural: Allegories at Work and Play in Kipling’s Indian Fiction
• 12 Archaeology and Gothic Desire: Vitality Beyond the Grave in H. Rider Haggard’s Ancient Egypt
• Bibliography
• Index