Literature of Terror
Volume One: The Gothic Tradition
2nd Edition
Edited by David Punter
Jan 1996
Pearson Education
ISBN: 0582237149
248 pages
$67.50 Paper original
The first edition was regarded as the definitive survey of Gothic and related terror writing in English. No other text considers this genre on such a scale and covers the theoretical perspectives so comprehensively. In the latest edition, the broad range of theoretical perspectives has been enlarged to include modern critical theories.
Volume One is a thoroughly updated edition of the original text, covering the period from 1765 up to the Edwardian age, exploring the richness and literary diversity of the gothic form: from the original eighteenth-century gothic of Ann Radcliffe to the melodramatic fiction of Wilkie Collins.
Contents
Preface to first edition
Preface to second edition
Acknowledgements
1. Introductory: dimensions of Gothic
2. The origins of Gothic fiction. Sentimentalism, Graveyard Poetry, The Sublime, Smollett, Horace Walpole, Clara Reeve, Sophia Lee
3. The classic Gothic novels. Ann Radcliffe and Matthew Lewis
4. Gothic and romanticism. Blake, Coleridge, Shelley, Byron, Keats, John Polidori, Mary Shelley
5. The dialectic of persecution. William Godwin, C.R. Maturin, James Hogg
6. Gothic, history and the middle classes. Scott, Bulwer Lytton, G.P.R. James, William Harrison Ainsworth, G.W.M Reynolds
7. Early American Gothic. Charles Brockden. Brown. Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe
8. Gothic and the sensation novel. Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Sheridan LeFanu
Appendix on Criticism
Bibliography
Index
Features
" The two volumes provide the most up-to-date and comprehensive introduction to gothic and related terror writing across the English language as a whole.
" Respected author - the text was originally published in 1980 to wide acclaim and following its publication, critical interest in gothic writing has risen substantially.
" Broad scope of the study - final chapter considers the topical issue of the relationship between cultural material and sociopath behavior.
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