A Geography of Victorian Gothic Fiction: Mapping History's NightmaresThis is the first major full-length study of Victorian Gothic fiction. Combining original readings of familiar texts with a rich store of historical sources, A Geography of Victorian Gothic Fiction is an historicist survey of nineteenth-century Gothic writing--from Dickens to Stoker, Wilkie Collins to Conan Doyle, through European travelogues, sexological textbooks, ecclesiastic histories and pamphlets on the perils of self-abuse. Critics have thus far tended to concentrate on specific angles of Gothic writing (gender or race), or the belief that the Gothic 'returned' at the so-called fin de siècle. Robert Mighall, by contrast, demonstrates how the Gothic mode was active throughout the Victorian period, and provides historical explanations for its development from late eighteenth century, through the 'Urban Gothic' fictions of the mid-Victorian period, the 'Suburban Gothic' of the Sensation vogue, through to the somatic horrors of Stevenson, Machen, Stoker, and Doyle at the century's close. Mighall challenges the psychological approach to Gothic fiction which currently prevails, demonstrating the importance of geographical, historical, and discursive factors that have been largely neglected by critics, and employing a variety of original sources to demonstrate the contexts of Gothic fiction and explain its development in the Victorian period. |
Contents
History as Nightmare | 1 |
From Udolpho to Spitalfields Mapping Gothic London | 27 |
Haunted Houses I and II | 78 |
Atavism A Darwinian Nightmare | 130 |
Unspeakable Vices Moral Monstrosity and Representation | 166 |
Other editions - View all
A Geography of Victorian Gothic Fiction: Mapping History's Nightmares Robert Mighall Limited preview - 1999 |
Common terms and phrases
ancestral anthropology appears atavism Basingstoke Bertrand Bleak House body Castle century chapter context Count Dracula crime criminal critics cultural curse narratives dark Degeneration demon depicts Dickens Dickens's discourse Dracula early Gothic emphasis erotic evoke explain fearful Freud G. W. M. Reynolds Gilles de Rais Gothic fiction Gothic mode Gothic novels Harmondsworth haunted Helsing Henry Maudsley historical horror fiction human Hyde imagination Insanity Jacob's Island Jekyll Jekyll's Krafft-Ebing labyrinth late-Victorian legacy legend Literature Little Dorrit Lombroso London Machen Macmillan Madness Maudsley medieval modern Monkton monster monstrous moral Mysteries narrator nineteenth Nineteenth-Century observes Oxford passage past pathological Penguin perversion portrait primitive provides psychiatric psychological Radcliffe Radcliffe's refers representation represented Reynolds Reynolds's rhetorical romance rookeries Routledge savage scene scientific secret Seward sexology sexual Sigmund Freud slum Stevenson's Stoker's suggests supernatural tale terror tion tradition Urban Gothic vampire Van Helsing Victorian whilst writing