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 18th and early 19th-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.