Gothic Authors: Critical Revisions

Patrick McGrath is one of Britain's foremost contemporary novelists but very little has been written about his work to date. This new book offers readings of McGrath's fiction informed by recent scholarship and evaluates his creative contribution to the continuation of the Gothic tradition into the twenty-first century.

Mary Shelley reappraises the significance of Frankenstein alongside other works by Shelley which could be considered to revise the significance and fluctuating meanings of 'Gothic' during the Romantic period. It offers scholarly, fresh readings of the 1818 and 1831 editions of Frankenstein, as well as chapters upon the fiction that Shelley composed in between both editions, and during the same decade as its second edition. In its broader examination of Mary Shelley's work, this study is the first of its kind within the field of Gothic studies. Alongside sustained explorations of Frankenstein, Matilda, Valperga and The Last Man, the volume Mary Shelley reappraises some of the shorter essays and tales that the author composed for contemporary magazines. Angela Wright argues that the time is now right for a re-examination of the extent to which Shelley participated in and redirected the Gothic tradition.

This study of Bram Stoker focuses on Stoker as a Gothic writer. Identified with Dracula, Stoker is largely responsible for taking the Gothic away from medieval castles and placing it at the center of modern life. The study examines Stoker's contribution to the modern notion of Gothic and thus to the history of popular culture and demonstrates that the excess generally associated with the Gothic is Stoker's way of examining the social, economic, and political problems. His relevance today is his depiction of problems that continue to haunt us at the beginning of the twenty first century. What makes the current study unique is that it privileges Stoker's use of the Gothic but also addresses that Stoker wrote seventeen other books plus numerous articles and short stories. Since a number of these works are decidedly not Gothic, the study puts his Gothic novels and short stories into the perspective of everything that he wrote. The creator of Dracula also wrote The Duties of Clerks of Petty Sessions in Ireland, a standard reference work for clerks in the Irish civil service, as well as The Man and Lady Athlyne, two delightful romances. Furthermore, Stoker was fascinated with technological development and racial and gender development at the end of the century as well as in supernatural mystery. Indeed the study demonstrates that the tension between the things that can be explained rationally and the things that cannot is important to our understanding of Stoker as a Gothic writer.

This book considers the fiction of Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu (1814—73) in their original material and cultural contexts of the early-to-mid Victorian period in Ireland. Le Fanu's longstanding relationship with the Dublin University Magazine, a popular literary and political journal, is a crucial context in the examination of his work. Likewise, Le Fanu's fiction is considered as part of a wider surge of supernatural, historical and antiquarian activity by Irish Protestants in the period following the Act of Union between Great Britain and Ireland (1801). Le Fanu's habit of writing and re-writing stories is discussed in detail, a practice that has engendered much confusion and consternation. Posthumous collections of Le Fanu's work are compared with original publications, demonstrating the importance of these material and cultural contexts. This book reveals new critical readings of some of Le Fanu's best known fiction, while also casting light on some of his regrettably overlooked work through recontextualisation.

Richard Marsh' (Richard Bernard Heldmann, 1857—1915) was a bestselling, versatile and prolific author of gothic, crime, adventure, romantic and comic fiction. This book, the first on Marsh, establishes his credentials as a significant agent within the fin de siècle gothic revival. Marsh's work spans a range of gothic modes, including the canonical fin de siècle subgenres of urban and imperial gothic and gothic-inflected sensation and supernatural fiction, but also rarer hybrid genres such as the comic gothic and the occult romance. His greatest success came in 1897 when he published his bestselling invasion narrative The Beetle: A Mystery, a novel that articulated many of the key themes of fin de siècle urban gothic and outsold its close rival, Bram Stoker's Dracula, well into the twentieth century. The present work extends studies of Marsh's literary production beyond The Beetle, contending that, in addition to his undoubted interest in non-normative gender and ethnic identities, Marsh was a writer with an acute sense of spatiality, whose fiction can be read productively through the lens of spatial theory.

This book pays overdue attention to the British writer Ramsey Campbell, a key figure in the post-1970s boom in Anglo-American horror fiction. Despite a huge output and receiving every accolade within his field over a long career, Campbell has not yet been accorded anything like the wider critical recognition given to his contemporary Stephen King. This study concentrates also on Campbell's neglected novels and novellas, rather than the short stories for which he has been better known. The book Ramsey Campbell establishes the author's unique prose style, denoted by a haunted self-consciousness about the act of writing and role of readership, and his distinctive mediation of the Gothic tradition: religiously agnostic, politically liberal and ethically humane. For the first time, Campbell's works are interpreted in the contexts of trends in postmodernist and posthumanist thought and compared explicitly to King's, and his contribution to both Gothic studies and wider contemporary literature is appraised.