Frederick S. Frank

Douglass H. Thomson

Jack G. Voller

With its roots in Romanticism, antiquarianism, and the primacy of the imagination, the Gothic genre originated in the 18th century, flourished in the 19th, and continues to thrive today. This reference work provides an introduction to Gothic literature and its abundant criticism and summarizes contemporary developments and critical opinion in Gothic Studies. The volume includes alphabetically arranged entries for more than 50 Gothic writers from Horace Walpole to Stephen King. Each entry includes a primary bibliography, a critical essay on the author's place in the Gothic tradition, and a selected, annotated bibliography of scholarship. Entries for Russian, Japanese, French, and German writers give an international scope to the book, while the focus on English and American literature shows the dynamic nature of Gothicism today.

A Critical and Bibliographical Guide

Gothic Writers

"Voller reveals in Part 1 the way in which the psychological and narrative structures of the sublime, as elaborated by Edmund Burke and his contemporaries, gave Gothic fictions much of their characteristic shape and tone. He defines the Gothic mode in close readings of works by Radcliffe, Reeve, Lewis, and Brown. The Supernatural Sublime breaks new ground by establishing a classification schema for Gothic fictions, an anatomy based on the underlying structure of the sublime experience and its powerful influence on what can be called the metaphysical implications of Gothic supernaturalism." "In Part 2, Voller extends his examination of supernatural sublimity into the works of major Romantic authors on both sides of the Atlantic. He demonstrates that, while authors such as Coleridge, the Shelleys, Byron, Hawthorne, and Poe were familiar with Gothic supernaturalism, their use of the supernatural is not an adoption of Gothic conventions but a sophisticated critique of them. Influenced by Kant's idealist interpretation of sublimity, and rejecting what they understood to be the histrionic excesses of Gothic fiction, the Romantics elaborated a more psychologically astute and intellectually subtle supernaturalism that served as a foundation for later nineteenth-century supernaturalism."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Jack G. Voller

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