THE HANDBOOK OF THE GOTHIC 2ND EDITION
The Handbook of the Gothic 2nd Edition
Edited by
MARIE MULVEY-ROBERTS Reader in Literary Studies University of the West of England, Bristol
palgrave macmillan Selection and editorial matter © Marie Mulvey-Roberts 1998, 2009 Text © the various contributors 1998, 2009 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 2nd edition 2009978-0-230-00853-3
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10 9 8 7 6 S 4 3 2 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 For Nigel and all my Gothic students
Contents
Con tribu tors xiii
Preface to the Revised Edition xviii
Introduction to the First Edition xx
Writers of Gothic
AINSWORTH, W. HARRISON R. A. Gilbert 1 BECKFORD, WILLIAM Michael Franklin 2 BIERCE, AMBROSE Allan Lloyd Smith 5 BLACKWOOD, ALGERNON Thomas Willard 7 THE BRONTES Elizabeth Imlay 9 BROWN, CHARLES BROCKDEN T. J. Lustig 12 BUL WER L YTTON, EDWARD Helen Small 15 CARTEK ANGELA Elaine Jordan 17 COLLINS, (WILLIAM) WILKIE Andrew Smith 20 DACRE, CHARLOTTE Marie Mulvey-Roberts 21 DICKENS, CHARLES Benjamin F. Fisher 22 DOYLE, ARTHUR CONAN Clive Bloom 23 DU MAURIEK DAPHNE Avril Horner and Sue Zlosnik 26 GOETHE, J. W. von Eric Hadley Denton 27 HAWTHORNE, NATHANIEL Robert Miles 30 HILL,SUSAN Val Scullion 34 HOFFMANN, E. T. A. Hans-Ulrich Mohr 36 HOGG, JAMES Douglas S. Mack 38 IRVING, WASHINGTON Allan Lloyd Smith 40 JACKSON, SHIRLEY Jodey Castricano 41
Vll VIll Contents JACOBS, W. W. John Cloy 43 JAMES, HENRY T. J. Lustig 44 JAMES, MONTAGUE RHODES William Hughes 47 KING, STEPHEN David Punter 49 LE F ANU, J. SHERIDAN W. J. McCormack 51 LEE, TANITH Nick Freeman 53 LEWIS, MATTHEW Nicola Trott 54 LOVECRAFT, H. P. Clive Bloom 57 MACHEN, ARTHUR R. A. Gilbert 59 MATURIN, CHARLES ROBERT Cecile Malet-Dagreou 60 MEL VILLE,VILLE, HERMAN A. Robert Lee 63 ONIONS, OLIVER Rachel Jackson 66 POE, EDGAR ALLAN Benjamin F. Fisher 67 POLIDORI, JOHN Marie Mulvey-Roberts 75 RADCLIFFE, ANN Robert Miles 76 RICE, ANNE Marie Mulvey-Roberts 83 SADE, MARQUIS DE E. J. Clery 85 SHELLEY, MARY Marie Mulvey-Roberts 86 SHELLEY, P. B. Nicola Trott 92 STEVENSON, ROBERT LOUIS Jerrold E. Hogle 93 STOKER, BRAM William Hughes 96 WALPOLE, HORACE E. J. Clery 100 WILDE, OSCAR Neil Sammells 103
Gothic Terms, Themes, Concepts and Contexts
THE ABJECT Colette Conroy 106 BLUEBOOKS AND CHAPBOOKS Franz J. Potter 106 CABBALISM Thomas Willard 107 Contents ix COLONIAL GOTHIC Alexandra Warwick 108 COMIC GOTHIC Avril Horner and Sue Zlosnik 109 CONTEMPORARY GOTHIC Ann B. Tracy 109 COUNTERFEIT Jerrold E. Hogle 111 CYBERPUNK lain Hamilton Grant 112 DEATH Elisabeth Bronfen 113 THE DEMONIC Helen Stoddart 116 DOPPELGANGER Antonio Ballesteros Gonzalez 119 THE FANTASTIC Neil Cornwell 119 FEMALE GOTHIC Alison Milbank 120 GHOST STORIES R. A. Gilbert 124 GOLEM Madge Dresser 125 GOTH, GOTHIC U. A. Fanthorpe 126 GOTHIC ARCHITECTURE see GOTHIC REVIVAL 127 GOTHIC ART Graham Oven den 127 GOTHIC BODY Steven Bruhm 128 GOTHIC IN CHILDREN'S LITERATURE Charles Butler and 129 Hallie O'Donovan GOTHIC COMICS see GOTHIC GRAPHIC NOVEL AND COMICS 131 GOTHIC DRAMA Jeffrey N. Cox 131 GOTHIC FAIRY-TALE Lucie Armitt 135 GOTHIC FILM Ian Can rich 136 GOTHIC GRAPHIC NOVEL AND COMICS Anna Powell 141 GOTHIC LANGUAGE John Charles Smith 142 GOTHIC MANSERVANT Janet Todd 143 GOTHIC MEDICINE William Hughes 144 GOTHIC MUSIC Diane Mason 145 GOTHIC NOVEL Victor Sage 146 GOTHIC PARODY Darryl Jones 154 x Contents GOTHIC PHOTOGRAPHY Philip Stokes 155 GOTHIC REVIV AL Victor Sage 156 GOTHIC ROMANCE Ann. B. Tracy 169 GOTHIC SCIENCE FICTION David Seed 173 GRAPHIC NOVEL see GOTHIC GRAPHIC NOVEL AND COMICS 174 GRAVEYARD SCHOOL Steve Clark 174 THE GROTESQUE Neil Cornwell 175 HERMETISM Thomas Willard 175 HERO-VILLAIN Helen Stoddart 176 HEROINE Avril Horner 180 HISTORICO-GOTHIC Mary Waldron 184 HORROR Fred Botting 184 ILLUMINATI NOVELS Pascal Nicklas 192 IMAGINATION Philip W. Martin 193 JACOBEAN TRAGEDY Charles Butler 197 THE LAMIA Philip W. Martin 198 LYCANTHROPY Tina Rath 198 MADNESS Helen Small 199 MAGICAL REALISM Amaryll Beatrice Ghanady 204 MONSTROSITY Fred Botting 204 NECROMANCY Carolyn D. Williams 205 NEW GOTHIC see CONTEMPORARY GOTHIC 206 NIGHTMARE Philip W. Martin 206 NORTHANGER NOVELS Mary Waldron 207 OCCULTISM Thomas Willard 208 ORIENTALISM Michael Franklin 211 PARANOID GOTHIC David Punter 214 PENNY DREADFULS R. A. Gilbert 215 THE PHANTOM Allan Lloyd Smith 216 POLITICO-GOTHIC Mary Waldron 217 Contents xi POPULAR HORROR FICTION Richard Kerridge 218 PORPHYRIA Tina Rath 218 POSTCOLONIAL GOTHIC Ken Gelder 219 ROMAN NOIR Terry Hale 220 ROMANTICISM Philip W. Martin 226 ROSICRUCIAN FICTION Marie Mulvey-Roberts 230 SADO-MASOCHISM Elisabeth Bronjen 231 SCHAUERROMAN Marie Mulvey-Roberts 232 SENSATION FICTION Sally Ledger 233 SENSIBILITY Janet Todd 233 SPIRITUALISM Sally Ledger 234 STURM UND DRANG Marie Mulvey-Roberts 235 THE SUBLIME Alison Milbank 235 THE SUPERNATURAL Clive Bloom 241 TERROR David Punter 243 TRANSGRESSION Avril Horner 249 THE UNCANNY see UNHEIMLICH 250 UNHEIMLICH (THE UNCANNY) Avril Horner 250 URBAN GOTHIC Alexandra Warwick 251 VAMPIRE William Hughes 252 WANDERING JEW Hans-Ulrich Mohr 257 WEREWOLF see LYCANTHROPY 259 WITCHES AND WITCHCRAFT Faye Ringel 259 WIZARDS Faye Ringel 261 ZERRISSENHEIT Christoph Houswitschka 263
Gothic Locations
AFRICAN-AMERICAN GOTHIC Carol Margaret Davison 266 AMERICAN GOTHIC Allan Lloyd Smith 267 xii Contents ANGLO-CARIBBEAN GOTHIC Carol Margaret Davison 276 AUSTRALIAN GOTHIC Gerry Turcotte 277 COLONIAL GOTHIC Alexandra Warwick 287 ENGLISH-CANADIAN GOTHIC Gerry Turcotte 288 FRENETIQUE SCHOOL Terry Hale 292 GERMAN GOTHIC Hans-Ulrich Mohr 298 IRISH GOTHIC w. J. McCormack 303 JAPANESE GOTHIC Eimi Ozawa 305 POSTCOLONIAL GOTHIC Ken Gelder 306 ROMAN NOIR Terry Hale 307 RUSSIAN GOTHIC Neil Cornwell 313 SAN FRANCISCO GOTHIC William Veeder 318 SCOTTISH GOTHIC Douglas S. Mack 319 SOUTHERN GOTHIC A. Robert Lee 321 WELSH GOTHIC Sion Eirian 324
Selected Further Reading 325
Websites on the Gothic 333
Gothic Film - A Select Filmography 334 Ian Conrich
Index 339 Contributors
Lucie Armitt, Senior Lecturer, Deparhnent of English, University of Wales, Bangor, UK Clive Bloom, Emeritus Professor of English and American Studies, Middlesex University, London, UK Fred Botting, Professor and Director of Institute for Cultural Research, Lancaster University, UK Elisabeth Bronfen, Professor of English and American Studies, University of Zurich, Switzerland Steven Bmhm, Robert and Ruth Lumsden Professor of English, University of Western Ontario, London, Canada Charles Butler, Senior Lecturer, Department of English, University of the West of England, Bristol, UK Jodey Castricano, Associate Professor, Department of Critical Studies, University of British Columbia, Canada Steve Clark, Lecturer in English, Osaka University, Japan E. J. Clery, Professor of Eighteenth-Century Literature, University of Southampton, UK John Cloy, Reference Bibliographer and Associate Professor, J. D. Williams Library, University of Mississippi, USA Ian Conrich, Senior Lecturer and Director of the Centre for New Zealand Studies, Birkbeck, University of London, UK Colette Conroy, Lecturer, Department of Drama and Theatre, Royal Holloway, University of London, UK Neil Cornwell, Emeritus Professor of Russian and Comparative Literature, University of Bristol, UK Jeffrey N. Cox, Professor of English and of Comparative Literature and Humanities, University of Colorado at Boulder, USA Carol Margaret Davison, Associate Professor of English Literature, University of Windsor, Ontario, Canada Eric Hadley Denton, Assistant Professor, Department of German, Wheaton College, Norton, Massachusetts, USA
xiii xiv Contributors Madge Dresser, Reader in History, University of the West of England, Bristol, UK Sion Eirian, playwright, poet and screen writer, Cardiff, UK U. A. Fanthorpe, poet, Wootton-under-Edge, Gloucestershire, UK Benjamin F. Fisher, Professor of English, University of Mississippi, USA Michael Franklin, Senior Lecturer in English, University of Swansea, UK Nick Freeman, Senior Lecturer in English, Loughborough University, UK Ken Gelder, Professor of English and Cultural Studies, University of Melbourne, Australia Amaryll Beatrice Ghanady, Professor in Comparative Literature, University of Montreal, Canada R. A. Gilbert, Independent scholar, Clevedon, UK Antonio Ballesteros Gonzaalez, Lecturer, English, University of Castilla, La Mancha, Spain lain Hamilton Grant, Senior Lecturer, Philosophy, University of the West of England, Bristol, UK Terry Hale, University Research Fellow, Performance Translation Centre, University of Hull, UK Jerrold E. Hogle, University Distinguished Professor, University of Arizona, USA Avril Horner, Emeritus Professor of English Literature, Kingston University, London, UK Christoph Houswitschka, Professor, English Literature, University of Bamberg, Germany William Hughes, Professor of Gothic Studies, Bath Spa University, Bath, UK Elizabeth Imlay, writer and publisher, Tunbridge Wells, Kent, UK Rachel Jackson, research graduate, Department of English, University of the West of England, Bristol, UK Darryl Jones, Senior Lecturer, English, Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland Elaine Jordan, was Visiting Fellow, Department of Literature, Film and Theatre Studies, University of Essex, Colchester, UK Contributors xv Richard Kerridge, Senior Lecturer, English Literature and Creative Writing, Bath Spa University, Bath, UK Sally Ledger, Hildred Carlile Professor in English, Royal Holloway, University of London, UK A. Robert Lee, Professor of American Literature, Nihon University, Japan T. J. Lustig, Lecturer, American Studies, Keele University, UK Douglas S. Mack, Emeritus Professor of English, University of Stirling, UK Cecile Malet-Dagreou, postgraduate, Goldsmiths College, University of London, UK Philip W. Martin, Professor of Literature, De Montford University, Leicester, UK Diane Mason, School of English and Creative Studies, Bath Spa University, Bath, UK W. J. McCormack, former Professor of Literary History, Goldsmiths College, University of London, UK Alison Milbank, Lecturer, Theology and Religious Studies, University of Nottingham, UK Robert Miles, Professor, Department of English, Victoria University, British Columbia, Canada Hans-Ulrich Mohr, Professor, English Institute, Technical University of Dresden, Germany Marie Mulvey-Roberts, Reader in Literary Studies, University of the West of England, Bristol, UK Pascal Nicklas, Lecturer, English, Humboldt University of Berlin, Germany Hallie O'Donovan, Dalkey, Co. Dublin, Ireland Graham Ovenden, English painter, fine art photographer, writer and architect, Cornwall, UK Eimi Ozawa, Assistant Professor, Department of Multicultural• Multilingual Studies, Tokyo Gakugei University, Japan Franz J. Potter, Assistant Professor, National University, California, USA Anna Powell, Reader in Film and English Studies, Manchester Metropolitan University, UK xvi Contributors David Punter, Professor of English, University of Bristol, UK Tina Rath, writer and broadcaster, London, UK Faye Ringel, Professor of Humanities, US Coast Guard Academy, USA Victor Sage, Emeritus Professor of Literature, School of English and American Studies, University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK Neil Sammells, Professor of English and Irish Literature, Bath Spa University, Bath, UK Val Scullion, Associate Lecturer, The Open University, East of England and East Midlands, UK David Seed, Professor of American Literature, University of Liverpool, UK Helen W. Small, Fellow and Tutor in English, Pembroke College, University of Oxford, UK Allan Lloyd Smith, Senior Lecturer, American Literature, University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK Andrew Smith, Professor of English Studies, University of Glamorgan, UK John Charles Smith, Faculty Lecturer in French Linguistics, Fellow of St Catherine's College, University of Oxford, UK Helen J. Stoddart, Lecturer in English and Film Studies, Keele University, UK Philip Stokes was Senior Research Fellow at Nottingham Trent University, Nottingham, UK Janet Todd, Professor, English, President of Lucy Cavendish College, University of Cambridge and Herbert Grierson Professor of English, University of Aberdeen, UK Ann B. Tracy was Associate Professor in English, State University of New York at Plattsburgh, USA Nicola Trott, Senior Tutor, Balliol College, Oxford, UK Gerry Turcotte, Professor, English, University of Notre Dame, Sydney, Australia William Veeder, Emeritus Professor of English Literature, University of Chicago, USA Mary Waldron was Visiting Fellow, Department of Literature, Film and Theatre Studies, University of Essex, Colchester, UK Contributors xvii Alexandra Warwick, Senior Lecturer, Department of English and Linguistics, University of Westminster, London, UK Thomas Willard, Associate Professor, English, University of Arizona, USA Carolyn D. Williams, Senior Lecturer, School of English and American Literature, University of Reading, UK Sue Zlosnik, Professor, Department of English, Manchester Metropolitan University, UK Preface to the Revised Edition
This revised edition of The Handbook to Gothic Literature (1998) has been renamed as The Handbook of the Gothic to take greater account of the inter• disciplinarity of the Gothic which has become increasingly apparent over the last decade. Entries have been reordered under new headings: 'Writers of Gothic', 'Gothic Terms, Themes, Concepts and Contexts' and 'Gothic Locations', for even greater accessibility. Nevertheless, naming, labelling and categorising can never hope to contain the ever-increasing Gothic diaspora. Here you will find new entries on the following writers: Wilkie Collins, Charlotte Dacre, Susan Hill, Shirley Jackson, Stephen King, Tanith Lee, Daphne Du Maurier, Oliver Onions and John Polidori. Certain authors, both living and dead, might protest about being in• cluded in a Gothic handbook, for fear of being marginalised or abducted into the nether world of the generic. Yet has not the Gothic already secreted itself into the mainstream, at the same time as masquerading on the margins? For example, the canonical Gothic writings of the major American writers, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville and Henry James, who are represented in this book, are veritable keystones of the literary estab• lishment. The Gothic has played a significant and sometimes underrated role in helping to build dominant cultures. This literally has been the case in Britain, where the style of Victorian Gothic was adopted for the rebuilding of the Houses of Parliament. From its genesis, Gothic literature has been inextricably linked with architecture in a symbiosis of text, flesh and stone. The father of the Gothic novet Horace Walpole built the miniature Gothic castle Straw• berry Hill; William Beckford, the author of the orientalist Vathek (1787), was the creator of the gothicised Fonthill Abbey; and Edward Bulwer Lytton, who penned A Strange Story (1862), transformed his family seat Knebworth House into a Gothic extravaganza. All three belonged to the British ruling class as Members of Parliament and elected to externalise the Gothic imagination through book and brick. Yet throughout its history, the Gothic has also been sidelined. From the eighteenth century onwards it has been perceived as morally dubious, a Cinderella to Romanticism, pushed out of the Victorian novel into the short story and only really allowed to peak at the decline of the old century. Yet the Gothic has persisted to morph and modify itself and find new sites for incubation and invasion. xviii Preface to the Revised Edition xix The section on 'Gothic Terms, Themes, Concepts and Contexts' tracks the footfalls of the Gothic where it has trespassed into other disciplines such as art, film, photography, cyberpunk etc ..... New entries may be found on the relationship of Gothic to children's literature, comedy, music, medicine, the abject, bluebooks, Gothic graphic novels and comics. The final section, 'Gothic Locations', highlights the global and local impact of the Gothic in regard to place and contains extra material on Anglo-Caribbean, Japanese and African-American writers. The existing contributions on Gothic drama and film have been revised and sup• plemented by a new filmography which is subdivided into American Gothic, Antipodean Gothic, Asian Gothic, Classical Hollywood Horrors, Female Gothic and Gothic Film Adaptations. The original bibliography has been updated, expanded and streamlined into three new subsections: 'Anthologies and Collections of Gothic Writing', 'General Gothic Studies' and 'Gender and the Gothic'. There is also an additional list of Gothicised websites. In total, this revised edition has been extended to contain over a hundred entries by nearly eighty contributors from Australia, Canada, Germany, Ireland, Japan, Spain, Switzerland, the UK and USA. The Handbook to Gothic Literature was a first of its kind. Since its pub• lication in 1998, there has been an almost monstrous proliferation of other such reference works. These textual doppelgangers include: A Companion to the Gothic (2000), Gothic Writers: A Critical and Bibliographical Guide (2002), The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction (2002), The Gothic (2004), Gothic Literature: A Gale Critical Companion (2006) and The Routledge Companion to Gothic (2007). All testify to a concerted endeavour to impose order and system on that which defies and subverts it. Editors and their contributors have drawn up maps of horror and charted twisted trails of terror to guide readers faced with the anarchy of the Gothic in all its layers of darkness. This A to Z reveals how the Gothic has shone a sickly taper on the individual and collective psyche, served as social, political and historical commentary, galvanised and destabilised national consciousnesses and provided the occasional cathartic thumbscrew. Lurking in these pages are the shadows and spectres of fear, death, the uncanny, ruin, redemption, the supernatural, excess, abjection, the monstrous, horrific and terrifying which, along with the serpents of forbidden desire, manifest the Gothic's perennial imperatives. I would like to thank Paula Kennedy for going ahead with this revised edition, Penny Simmons for her sterling editorial work and my Gothic teaching colleague Dr Zoe Brennan for her support. It was with great regret that shortly before the book went to press we received the very sad news of the death of one of our contributors U. A. Fanthorpe.
MARIE MULVEy-ROBERTS Introduction to the First Edition
'I will read you their names directly; here they are in my pocket• book: "Castle of Wolfenbach," "Clermont," "Mysterious Warnings," "Necromancer of the Black Forest/' "Midnight Bell," "Orphan of the Rhine," and "Horrid Mysteries." Those will last us some time.' 'Yes; pretty well; but are they all horrid? Are you sure they are all horrid?' Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey (1818)
Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey has become the definitive satiric para• digm for the delusions of the Gothic reader engendering the dangers of Gothic reading. When consigned to a list of future reading in the feckless Isabella Thorpe's pocket-book, the fears generated by these Northanger novels, rather than being domesticated, are so positioned as to accentu• ate the prolepsis of redoubtable terrors. The impulse to catalogue and classify in the spirit of Augustan taxon• omy serves us with the illusion of gaining control over the otherwise un• containable. The murky flux of the formless mass of Gothic space becomes less terrifying when confined to a handbook, particularly one that is arranged in alphabetical order. Like the horror film The Entity, which stars a gargantuan shapeless phenomenon that threatens to engulf the entire film set in its ever-expanding protean borders, the Gothic cultural phenomenon continues to break its boundaries. The Handbook to Gothic Literature sets out to delineate the contours, points of transgression, cross-over and cross-fertilisation that characterise Gothic literature and its tangential disciplines: architecture, art, film, music and photography. The hideous progeny of Gothic literature has spawned a textual equiva• lent of the race of devils that Victor Frankenstein feared 'might make the very existence of the species of man a condition precarious and full of terror'.l Resistance to such a Gothic invasion has been mounted by a phalanx of critics in a two-pronged attack. Disarming the Gothic text by analysing it, is a variant on Wordsworth's 'We murder to Dissect'} which is particularly apposite when Frankenstein is being considered. Like Victor, who destroys the female he is creating as a mate for his creature, the literary critic dismembers and fragments the whole into customised parts. From there, follow classification and sub-division of text, author, concept, many of which are re-entered and cross-referenced under differ- xx Introduction to the First Edition xxi ent categories such as national or regional divisions. This combination of analysis and classification underscores Gothic literature in its broad contours as well as in its idiosyncrasies. Such tactics are surety against the danger of us failing to see the Gothic castle for the gargoyles. This book is more than an inventory of the sinister, the fantastical, and the eerie, it is a passport to what Terry Castle calls the 'hag-ridden realm of [the] unconscious'.3 Duly labelled and arranged under headings ranging from 'The Sublime' to the 'Rosicrucian', the compendium is divided into entries that are predominantly mainstream and those that are primarily peripheral. The bifurcation of Gothic writing which tends to default along the gendered lines of female 'Terror' and male 'Horror' is included, for example, in the main section. In the second half, entries on dread-related areas such as 'The Uncanny' and 'The Grotesque' are suggestive of how 'Gothic' should not be traduced. At once an umbrella term that has traditionally covered a multitude of the fictional sinned against and sinning, the nuances of what we understand by it as a site of difference within a panoply of family resemblances, is represented in this collection. What is Gothic literature? Is it a plot, a trope, a top os, a discourse, a mode of representation, conventions of characterisation, or a composite of all these aspects? Associated with the traditional Gothic Novel is an ivy-covered haunted ruin, a swooning heroine replete with sensibility, and a tyrannical villain, bequeathed with a lock, a key and a castle. Constituting and constitutive of anachronism and counterfeit, the Gothic plot, the proverbial textual folly, is a mirror diverting us from the Gorgon's gaze, that is, at least once removed from the source of trauma and taboo. The concoction is a dark yet familiar brew - an uneasy and eerie dialectic between anxiety and desire. A working definition of 'Gothic' and 'Gothic literature', with its polyvalency and slippage of meaning, may be gleaned from the entries aggregated here. The Handbook to Gothic Literature is also an index to otherness, for it captures and cata• logues a way of looking at the world that is redolent of something other than itself. More perplexing still is the way in which, while trying to lock onto the Gothic co-ordinates, one can end up chasing a zero vanishing point, especially since so much of Gothic writing is preoccupied with gaps. On a pragmatic note, there will inevitably be gaps of omission par• ticularly as Gothic culture continues to evolve. The idea for The Handbook was inspired by Frederick S. Frank, whose glossary of Gothic terms in his The First Gothics (1987) it is intended to complement. Particularly cap• tivating are his beguiling Freudian categories as in the Beckfordian phallic genre of novels exhibiting 'Toweromania' and 'Turret Gothic', whose gendered counterparts, 'Grotto Gothic' and 'Grottophilia', are set in womb-like, cavernous environments. xxii Introduction to the First Edition As an anatomy of the Gothic world and an unholy Bible of the world's leading Gothicists, this Handbook purports to be introductory, referential and innovatory. Popular representations of the Gothic subsist with high cultural forms. Marginalised Gothicisms, such as 'Welsh Gothic', are rep• resented alongside canonical Gothic writers like Ann Radcliffe (if such appended designations are not respectively tautological or oxymoronic). The Gothic writer, to misappropriate Swift in A Tale of a Tub, belongs to 'the Republick of dark Authors' who span the dark side of the solar ray of the Rational Enlightenment to the present day. Landmark writers that form the main contours of the Gothic landscape make up most entries. An appended list of further reading, which gives priority to 'Female Gothic' as a distinct category, includes brief bibliographies for six of the most popular writers: Horace Walpole, Ann Radcliffe, Edgar Allan Poe, Mary Shelley, Bram Stoker and Angela Carter. Gothic life, like that of a giant poisonous plant with far-reaching ten• drils, has found its sustenance by feeding off the credulities of its readers. This hot-house hybrid is constantly mutating, making new growths out of old as in its propensity for parody and pastiche. What remains consistent, according to Angela Carter, is the retention of 'a sin• gular moral function - that of provoking unease'.4 This inflection of Gothic as un-ease or dis-ease invites comparisons with the pathological. Having taken up residence in its host, the Gothic replicates itself throughout our culture like a virus. While resistant to the antidote of realism, it persistently conjugates with the dark side of contemporaneity, at the same time, making a textual negotiation with history. Apart from time there is place. The diaspora of Gothic writing has led to the emer• gence of distinct traditions in Australia and Canada and beyond. Regrettably space does not allow all the countries who have either im• ported or incubated Gothic cultural representations to be included here. Pragmatism dictated by undergraduate reading lists has, inevitably, re• stricted the entries to English-speaking countries and selected European black spots of the sinister, the uncanny and the terrible, like France, Germany and Russia. It is to those who have created this Gothic topography, that I am most grateful. Many contributors are leading Gothicists, who have pushed back the frontiers of our understanding of the mechanisms of fear and the perverse attraction to the creeping horrors of the imagination. William Hughes has been particularly helpful as a source of reassurance and unfailingly sound advice while Macmillan's Charmian Hearne has been a most patient and understanding editor. Her fund of wisdom, insight and faith in the project, have shed much-needed light, particu• larly when I have felt emeshed in pockets of Gothic darkness. Neil Cornwell, Norah Crook, Marion Glastonbury, Naomi Lester, Valery Rose Introduction to the First Edition xxiii and my family deserve special mention for their support. Finally, I would like to thank my students for their Gothic enthusiasms and trust that this book will match up to their Gothic requirements. Though it may not contain definitive answers to such questions as 'Is Gothic literature a sub-genre of Romanticism or the other way round?', as an adjunct to Angela Carter's observation that 'we live in Gothic times? the Handbook goes a long way in showing us where we came from and where we are going.
Bristol MARIE MULVEy-ROBERTS
Notes
1. Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, ed. Johanna M. Smith (Boston: Bedford Books of St Martin's Press, 1992), p. 140. 2. William Wordsworth, 'The Tables Turned', The Lyrical Ballads (1798; London: Oxford University Press, 1931), p. 186. 3. Terry Castle, The Female Thermometer: Eighteenth-Century Culture and the Invention of the Uncanny (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 5. 4. Angela Carter, Afterword to Fireworks, in Burning Your Boats: Collected Short Stories (London: Vintage Random House, 1996), p. 459. 5. Ibid., p. 460.