A Selective Research Bibliography for the Gothic

Stephen C. Behrendt

Spring 2011

Bibliographical Materials

Blakey, Dorothy. The Minerva Press, 1790-1820. London: Oxford University Press, 1939.
Bleier, Everett F. The Guide to Supernatural Fiction. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1983.
Cox, Jeffrey. Seven Gothic Dramas, 1789-1825. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1992. A valuable collection of early Gothic works for the stage, with excellent introductions.
Frank, Frederick S. “The Gothic Romance: 1762-1820,” in Horror Literature: A Core Collection and Reference Guide, ed. Marshall B. Tymm. New York: R. R. Bowker, 1981, pp. 3-175.
-----. The First Gothics: Critical Guide to the English Gothic Novel. New York: Garland, 1987. Excellent, comprehensive bibliography with plot synopses and bibliographical data on critical and other responses to individual works.
-----. Guide to the Gothic: An Annotated Bibliography of Criticism. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1984. Very useful digest to criticism before 1984. A time-saver when it comes to tracking down what’s in print and where. Don’t trust the annotations to be entirely reliable, however, especially when it comes to evaluative comments about the quality of individual articles and books. There’s still no substitute for looking at the pieces in the original and making your own educated decisions.
Garside, Peter, James Raven, and Rainer Schöwerling, eds. The English Novel 1770-1829. 2 vols. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. An extraordinary bibliography of virtually all novels published in Britain, 1770-1829, with information about reviews, attribution, and other critical and bibliographical apparatus. An essential research resource.
Haining, Peter, ed. The Shilling Shockers: Stories of Terror from the Gothic Bluebooks. London: Victorl Gollancz, 1978. An early critical anthology of “blue book” Gothic chapbooks.
Hubin, Allen J. The Bibliography of Crime Fiction: 1749-1975. Delmar, CA: Publisher’s, 1979. Claims to list all mystery, detective, police, suspense published in English. Not really totally comprehensive, but impressive anyway.
Koch, Angela. “‘The Absolute Horror of Horrors’ Revised: A Bibliographical Checklist of Early-Nineteenth-Century Gothic Bluebooks.” Cardiff Corvey / Reading the Romantic Text 9 (December 2002). http://www.cardiff.ac.uk/encap/journals/corvey/articles/printer/cc09_n03.html
Mayo, Robert D. The English Novel in the Magazines, 1740-1815; with a Catalogue of 1375 Magazine Novels and Novelettes. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1963. The subtitle says it all: a useful catalogue of serialized and short novels, including Gothics.
McNutt, Dan J. The Eighteenth-Century Gothic Novel: An Annotated Bibliography of Criticism and Selected Texts. New York: Garland Press, 1975. Helpful on the relation of the Gothic novel to the “mainstream” English novel in the eighteenth century.
Potter, Franz, ed. Literary Mushrooms: Tales from the Gothic Chapbooks. Crestl;ine, CA: Zittaw Press, 2009. A collection of Gothic sensational chapbooks (“bluebooks”).
Spector, Robert D. The English Gothic: A Bibliographic Guide to Writers from Horace Walpole to Mary Shelley. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1983. Good. Contains critical essays on the genre and on individual authors, with good bibliographies.
Summers, Montague. A Gothic Bibliography. London: Fortune Press, 1941; rpt. New York: Russell and Russell, 1964. A bit dated, obviously, but a classic nevertheless.
Thomson, Douglass H; Jack C. Voller; and Frederick S. Frank, ed.s. Gothic Writers: A Critical and Bibliographical Guide. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2001.
Tracy, Ann B. The Gothic Novel 1790-1830: Plot Summaries and Index to Motifs. Lexington: Kentucky University Press, 1981. Useful, especially for the index to Gothic motifs.

Critical Studies of the Gothic

Bayer-Berenbaum, Linda. The Gothic Imagination: Expansion in Gothic Literature and Art. Teaneck, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1982. Usefully explores relationships between verbal and visual aspects of the Gothic.
Birkhead, Edith. The Tale of Terror: A Study of the Gothic Romance. London: Constable, 1921; rpt. New York: Russell and Russell, 1963. Dated.
Botting, Fred. Gothic. London: Routledge, 1996. Good background source.
Brown, Marshall. The Gothic Text. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005. Excellent scholarly discussion that considers both British and Continental aspects of the Gothic.
Coleman, William E. On the Discrimination of Gothicisms. New York: Arno Press, 1980.
Cooke, Arthur. “Some Side-Lights on the Theory of Gothic Romance,” Modern Language Quarterly, 12 (1951): 429-436.
Day, Patrick. In the Circles of Fear and Desire: A Study in Gothic Fantasy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985.
Doody, Margaret Ann. “Deserts, Ruins and Troubled Waters: Female Dreams in Fiction and the Development of the Gothic Novel,” Genre, 10 (1977): 529-72.
Durant, D. “Ann Radcliffe an the Conservative Gothic,” Studies in English Literature, 22 (1982): 519-30.
Gamer, Michael. Romanticism and the Gothic: Genre, Reception, and Canon Formation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. An excellent interdisciplinary examination of Gothic writing in its cultural contexts.
Gautier, Gary. “Ann Radcliffe’s The Italian in Context: Gothic Villains, Romantic Heroes, and a New Age of Power Relations.” Genre 32 (1999): 201-24.
Haggerty, George E. “Fact and Fantasy in the Gothic Novel,” Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 39 (1985): 379-91.
Hennessey, Brendan. The Gothic Novel. London: Longman, 1978). A volume in the “Writers and Their Work” series; brief but useful overview of the genre and its spin-offs up to the present.
Hoevel;er, Diane Long. Gothic Riffs: Secularizing the Uncanny in the European Imaginary, 1780-1820. Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2010. Essential reading. An extremely sophisticate and wide-ranging analysis of the cultural, political, social, and ideological implications and functions of Romantic-era Gothic literature, including drama, opera, and fairy tales.
Hogle, Jerrold E. “The Restless Labyrinth: Cryptonymy in the Gothic Novel,” Arizona Quarterly 36 (Winter 1980), 330-58.
——, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. An excellent collection of essays.
——. “Introduction,” The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction.: 1-20.
Howard, Jacqueline. Reading Gothic Fiction: A Bakhtinian Approach. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007.
Howells, Carol Ann. Love, Mystery, and Misery: Feeling in Gothic Fiction. London: Athlone Press, 1978; rpt. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1979.
Hume, Robert D. “Gothic versus Romantic: A Revaluation of the Gothic Novel,” PMLA, 84 (1969): 282-90.
Jacobs, Edward. Accidental Migrations: An Archeology of Gothic Discourse. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2000.
Kilgour, Maggie. The Rise of the Gothic Novel. London: Routledge, 1995.
LeTellier, Robert I. An Intensifying Vision of Evil: The Gothic Novel (1764-1820) as a Self-Contained Literary Cycle. Salzburg, Salzburg Series, Universität Salzburg, 1980.
Lewis, Paul. “Beyond Mystery: Emergence from Delusion as a Pattern in Gothic Fiction,” Gothic 2 (June 1980), 7-13.
. MacAndrew, Elizabeth. The Gothic Tradition in Fiction. New York: Columbia University Press, 1979.
May, Leland Chandler. Parodies of the Gothic Novel. New York: Arno Press, 1980.
Miles, Robert. Gothic Writing 1750-1820: A Geneology. London: Routledge, 1993. An extremely important historical and thematic study, by one of the most important modern scholars of the Gothic.
——. Romantic Misfits. New York: Palgrave, 2008. Another good study.
Mise, Raymond W. The Gothic Heroine and the Nature of the Gothic Novel. New York: Arno Press, 1980.
Morris, D. B. “Gothic Sublimity,” New Literary History, 16 (1985): 299-319.
Mulvey-Roberts, Marie, ed. The Handbook to Gothic Literature. New York: New York University Press, 1998. A collection of introductory essays.
Napier, Elizabeth R. The Failure of Gothic: Problems of Disjunction in an Eighteenth-Century Literary Form. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987.
Nelson, Lowry, Jr. “Night Thoughts on the Gothic Novel,” Yale Review, 52 (1963): 236-57. An influential – though early – article.
Potter, Franz. The History of Gothic Publishing, 1800-1815: Exhuming the Trade. New York: Palgrave, 2005. Good study of the demographics of publishing and reading in the Gothic trade during these years.
Punter, David. The Literature of Terror: A History of Gothic Fiction from 1765 to the Present Day. London: Longman, 1980. An important, major study.
——, ed. Companion to the Gothic. Oxford: Blackwell, 2000. An excellent source for all things Gothic, in a collection of up-to-date essays.
Purves, Maria. The Gothic and Catholoicism: Religion, Cultural Exchange and the Popular Novel, 1785-1829. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2009. A good study of the characteristic anti-Catholicism of British Gothic writing.
Reddin, Chitra Pershad. Forms of Evil in the Gothic Novel. New York: Arno Press, 1980. Not particularly good, but it treats an interesting theme.
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. The Coherence of Gothic Conventions. New York: Arno Press, 1980; rpt. New York: Methuen, 1986.
Summers, Montague. The Gothic Quest: A History of the Gothic Novel. London: Fortune Press, 1938; rpt. New York: Russell and Russell, 1964. It’s old – and reads that way – but it is also an important early serious study of the Gothic.
Tracy, Ann B. Patterns of Fear in the Gothic Novel, 1790-1830. New York: Arno Press, 1980.
Varma, Devendra P. The Gothic Flame: Being a History of the Gothic Novel in England: Its Origins, Efflorescence, Disintegration and Residuary Influences. London: A. Barker, 1957; rpt. New York: Russell and Russell, 1966. Despite the forbidding title, this is a useful and readable book that attempts to come to grips with the rise and fall of Gothic fiction within a historical and cultural context.
Watt, James. Contesting the Gothic: Fiction, Genre and Cultural Conflict, 1764-1832. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.
Watt, William. Shilling Shockers of the Gothic School: A Study of Chapbook Gothic Romances. New York: Russell and Russell, 1932. An early attempt to account for the contemporary success of Gothic chapbooks.
Williams, Ann. Art of Darkness: A Poetics of Gothic. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995.

Related Studies in Literary History

Behrendt, Stephen C. British Women Poets and the Romantic Writing Community. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009. Examines the relations of women poets in particular to the larger literary and cultural community of Britain during the Romantic period.
Briggs, Julia. Night Visitors: The Rise and Fall of the English Ghost Story. London: Faber, 1977. Useful discussion of the “ghost story” spin-off.
Clery, Emma J. The Rise of Supernatural Fiction, 1762-1800. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. A comprehensive, authoritative examination of the larger contexts for Gothic fiction in its early years.
Foster, James R. History of the Pre-Romantic Novel in England. New York: Modern Language Association, 1949. Dated, but still useful in some cases.
. Garrett, John. “The Eternal Appeal of the Gothic,” The Sphinx: A Magazine of Literature and Society, (1977): 1-7.
Gilbert, Sandra M. and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979. Extremely important feminist analysis of women writers and issues of gender.
Keane, Linda. Women Writers and the English Nation in the 1790s. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Examines the larger context of writing by British women during this important decade for Gothic writing.
Kelly, Gary. The English Jacobin Novel, 1780-1805. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976.
Klancher, Jon. The Making of English Reading Audiences, 1790-1832. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987. An early analysis of the reading habits and preferences of the British public during the Romantic period.
Lydenberg, Robin. “Gothic Architecture and Fiction: a Survey of Critical Responses,” Centennial Review 22 (Winter 1978), 95-109.
Miyoshi, Masao. The Divided Self: a Perspective on the Literature of the Victorians. New York: New York University Press, 1969.
Railo, Eino. The Haunted Castle: A Study of the Elements of English Romanticism. London: E. P. Dutton, 1927; rpt. New York: Humanities Press, 1964.
Ranger, Paul. ‘Terror and Pity reign in every Breast’: Gothic Drama in the London Patent Theatres, 1750-1820. London: Society for Theatre Research, 1991.
Roberts, Bette B. The Gothic Romance: Its Appeal to Women Writers and Readers in Late Eighteenth-Century England. New York: Arno Press, 1980. The real importance of this book lies in its exploration of issues of gender and ideology among women writers and the real and presumed audiences.
St. Clair, William. The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. An important, detailed study of the economics of publishing (and reading) during the Romantic period in Britain.
Thompson, G. R. “Gothic Fiction of the Romantic Age: Context and Mode,” Romantic Gothic Tales, 1790-1840. New York: Harper and Row, 1979, pp. 1-54.
Tompkins, J. M. S. The Popular Novel in England, 1770-1800. London: Constable, 1932; rpt. London: Methuen, 1969. Very useful on the context of popular fiction in general.
Voller, Jack. The Supernatural Sublime: The Metaphysics of Terror in Anglo-American Romanticism. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1994.

Studies in the Cultural Context

Alexander, B., ed. Life at Fonthill, 1807-1822. London, 1957.
Altick, Richard D. The English Common Reader: A Social History of the Mass Reading Public, 1800-1900. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957.
––. The Shows of London. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978.
Anderson, Jorgen. “Giant Dreams: Piranesi’s Influence in England,” English Miscellany 3 (1952), 49-59.
Backscheider, Paula. Spectacular Politics: Theatrical Power and Mass Culture in Early Modern England. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993.
Bredvold, L. I. The Natural History of Sensibility. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1962.
Brophy, Elizabeth Bergen. Women’s Lives and the 18th-Century Novel. Tampa: University of South Florida, 1991. Excellent contextualizing study.
Butler, Marilyn. Romantics, Rebels, and Reactionaries. New York: Oxford University Press, 1982. One of the very best introductions to the literary and cultural context of the later 18th and early 19th centuries in England.
Clark, Kenneth. The Gothic Revival: An Essay in the History of Taste, revised edition. New York, 1982. Excellent discussion of Gothicism in the visual arts, by the renowned art historian and cultural critic.
Conger, Syndy M. Matthew Lewis, Charles Robert Maturin and the Germans: An Interpretive Study of the Influence of German Literature on Two Gothic Novels. New York: Arno Press, 1977.
Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Random House / Vintage, 1979.
-----. Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, trans. R. Howard. New York: Random House, 1988.
. Garber, Frederick. “Meaning and Mode in Gothic Fiction,” Racism in the Eighteenth Century. Cleveland: Press of Case Western Reserve University, 1973, pp. 155-69.
Graham, Kenneth W., ed. Gothic Fictions: Prohibition/Transgression. New York: AMS Press, 1989. A collection of essays.
Greene, Donald. The Age of Exuberance: Backgrounds to Eighteenth-Century English Literature. New York: Random House, 1970.
Hipple, Walter J., Jr. The Beautiful, the Sublime, and the Picturesque in Eighteenth-Century British Aesthetic Theory. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1957. Excellent discussion of the impact of aesthetic theory on the arts and culture generally in the 18th century.
Malins, Edward. English Landscaping and Literature, 1660-1840. London: Oxford University Press, 1966.
Mayo, Robert D. “How Long Was Gothic Fiction in Vogue?” Modern Language Notes, 58 (1943): 58-64.
McGann, Jerome. The Poetics of Sensibility: A Revolution in Literary Style. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996.
Monk, Samuel Holt. The Sublime: A Study of Critical Theories in XVIII-Century England. New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1935. Dated, but an excellent study by one of the greatest 18th-century scholars America has produced.
Paulson, Ronald. “Gothic Fiction and the French Revolution,” Journal of English Literary History, 48 (1981): 532-54.
Pointon, Marcia. “Romanticism in English Art,” in The Romantics, ed. Stephen Prickett. London: Methuen, 1981. An excellent discussion, by a very fine art historian, in one of Methuen’s volumes in its “Context of English Literature” series.
Praz, Mario. The Romantic Agony, 2nd ed., trans. Angus Davidson. London: Oxford University Press, 1970. Important, influential book.
Sage, Victor. Horror Fiction in the Protestant Tradition. London: Macmillan, 1988.
Taylor, George. The French Revolution and the London Stage, 1789-1805. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
Wood, Gillian D’Arcy. The Shock of the Real: Romanticism and Visual Culture. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001.

Historically Contemporary Sources

Anon. Tales of Wonder: Containing The Castle of Enchantment or The Mysterious Deception. The Robbers Daughter or The Phantom of the Grotto. The Magic Legacy &c. London: Ann Lemoine, 1804.
Baillie, Joanna. “Introductory Discourse,” in A Series of Plays: in which it is Attempted to Delineate the Stronger Passions of the Mind, 3rd ed. vol. I. London: T. Cadell, 1800.
Barbauld, Anna Laetitia. “On the Pleasure Derived from Objects of Terror,” in John and Anna Laetitia [Barbauld] Aikin, Miscellaneous Pieces in Prose. London: Joseph Johnson, 1773.
Burke, Edmund. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757; 2nd ed. 1759), ed. J. T. Boulton. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1968. The best scholarly edition of Burke’s vastly important essay; this text reproduces the second (1759) edition.
Drake, Nathan. Literary Hours; or, Sketches Critical and Narrative. 2 vols. London, 1800.
Hurd, Richard. Letters on Chivalry and Romance. London: A. Millar and J. Woodyer, 1762.
Radcliffe, Ann. “The Supernatural in Poetry.” New Monthly Magazine and Literary Journal 7 (1826): 145-52.
Scantlebury, Thomas. The Rights of Protestants Asserted. London: Lane, 1798.

Selected Internet Resources

The Sickly Taper. This is a vast bibliographical site begun by the late Frederick S. Frank and now maintained by his successors. This is a simply splendid site for locating secondary sources for research, and it is undoubtedly the starting-point for most online investigation of all aspects of the Gothic. The site is presently being reconstructed.
http://www.thesicklytaper.com/INDEX.html

The Literary Gothic. This is a good site that tends to have both good materials and rather many broken links, bit it is certainly worth checking – after you visit The Sickly Taper, above:
http://www.litgothic.com/index_fl.html

Romantic Readings of the Gothic. A site that lists and describes some of the works that the major canonical Romantic-era writers are known to have read:
http://personal.georgiasouthern.edu/~dougt/gothic.htm

Sublime Anxiety: The Gothic Family and The Outsider. This is an online version of a special exhibit at the Univeristy of Virginia Library, focusing on early Gothic works and their treatments of family and and “outsider” figures. There are many useful sub-sections to explore, with lots of visual materials:
http://www.lib.virginia.edu/speccol/exhibits/gothic/index.html

International Gothic Association. This is the home page of the International Gothic Association, hosted at the University of Stirling, in Scotland.
http://www.iga.stir.ac.uk/

A Glossary of Literary Gothic Terms. This is a helpful site, maintained by Douglass Thomson, where you can find expanded definitions of key terms and concepts associated with the study of the Gothic:
http://personal.georgiasouthern.edu/~dougt/goth.html

Katherine Harris’s “Gothic Novel and Horror Fiction” site, which she maintains at San Jose State University. Here you will find lots of links to other resources, from particular authors to larger topics and themes relating to the Gothic:
http://www.sjsu.edu/faculty/harris/Gothic_Links.htm

Gothic Technologies: Visuality in the Romantic Era. A special issue of Romantic Praxis, a subsection of Romantic Circles, the premier online journal in Romanticism studies, with many resources (including electronic editions) to explore, in connection both with the Gothic and with other areas of literature and culture:
http://www.rc.umd.edu/praxis/gothic/toc.html

The Gothic Imagination. This excellent site collects materials from art, architecture, music and literature, with many useful materials linked directly to its sub-menus and with other materials accessible through the additional website links provided on the site:
http://www.faculty.de.gcsu.edu/~rviau/GothicIm.html