Romantic Gothic ─ An Edinburgh Companion

Romantic Gothic: An Edinburgh Companion provides a thorough critical, textual and historical account of the Gothic aesthetic as manifested across a wide range of Romantic-era literary texts, from the adumbrations of the Gothic mode in the proto-Romantic poetry of the 1740s, through to the 'belated' Gothic fictions of the late 1820s. Self-consciously breaching, like Hume and Gamer before it, the critical divide between what literary history has subsequently differentiated as the 'Gothic' and the 'Romantic', this collection of 17 newly commissioned chapters seeks to draw attention to what G. R. Thompson in 1947 termed 'dark Romanticism', that is, that prominent strain in late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century British, American and European literature in which the distinction between the popular, low-cultural reaches of the Gothic and the 'High' Romantic aesthetics of more canonical figures is all but erased.

Angela Wright is Senior Lecturer in Romantic Literature at the University of Sheffield. She is the editor of 'Eighteenth-century Gothic', a special issue of Gothic Studies (14/1, May 2012), the author of Gothic Fiction (Palgrave, 2007) and Britain, France and the Gothic, 1764-1820: The Import of Terror (Cambridge University Press, 2013). She is the co-editor of Ann Radcliffe, Romanticism and the Gothic (with Dale Townshend, forthcoming from Cambridge University Press, 2014), and is currently completing a study of Mary Shelley for the University of Wales Press.
Dale Townshend is Senior Lecturer in Gothic and Romantic Literature at the University of Stirling. His publications include The Orders of Gothic (AMS, 2007); four volumes in the Gothic: Critical Concepts in Literary and Cultural Studies series (co-edited with Fred Botting, Routledge, 2004); and Gothic Shakespeares (co-edited with John Drakakis, Rotuledge, 2008). Current projects include The Gothic World (co-edited with Glennis Byron, forthcoming from Routledge, 2013), and Ann Radcliffe, Romanticism and the Gothic (co-edited with Angela Wright, forthcoming from Cambridge University Press, 2014).