Key Concepts in the Gothic 1474405525, 9781474405522

Table of contents :
Contents
Acknowledgements
Dedication
Introduction
A–Z of Key Concepts and Terms
A
B
C
D
E
F
G
H
I
J
K
L
M
N
O
P
Q
R
S
T
U
V
W
X
Y
Z
Theories of Gothic
Fifteen Key Fictional Texts

Citation preview

KEY CONCEPTS IN THE GOTHIC

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Key Concepts in Literature Published titles Key Concepts in Literary Theory, 3rd edition Julian Wolfreys et al. Key Concepts in Contemporary Popular Fiction Bernice M. Murphy Key Concepts in the Gothic William Hughes www.edinburghuniversitypress.com/series/kcl

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Key Concepts in the Gothic William Hughes

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Edinburgh University Press is one of the leading university presses in the UK. We publish academic books and journals in our selected subject areas across the humanities and social sciences, combining cutting-edge scholarship with high editorial and production values to produce academic works of lasting importance. For more information visit our website: edinburghuniversitypress.com

© William Hughes, 2018 Edinburgh University Press Ltd The Tun – Holyrood Road, 12(2f) Jackson’s Entry, Edinburgh EH8 8PJ Typeset in 10/12 Adobe Sabon by IDSUK (DataConnection) Ltd, and printed and bound in Great Britain. A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 1 4744 0552 2 (hardback) ISBN 978 1 4744 0554 6 (webready PDF) ISBN 978 1 4744 0553 9 (paperback) ISBN 978 1 4744 0555 3 (epub) The right of William Hughes to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498).

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Contents

Acknowledgements Introduction A–Z of Key Concepts and Terms Theories of Gothic Fifteen Key Fictional Texts

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Acknowledgements

Many people within and beyond the academic community have supported me in myriad ways whilst I have been engaged in writing this book. Thanks go, first and foremost, to Gillian, who has stood by me in good times and bad, and who really deserves better than she gets from an individual implicated in a profession that frequently fails to recognise that academics deserve uninterrupted weekends and holidays unpunctuated by telephone calls. Through her wisdom I have finally begun to understand that life is finite, and much more of it should be reserved for people rather than professions. Jackie Jones and Adela Rauchova have been wonderfully tolerant editors during the time it has taken me to bring this work to completion, and I hope that this volume fulfils their expectations. I would also like to thank James Dale and Fiona Sewell for their support during the final preparation of the manuscript. Among the many colleagues who have supported me over a period of more than twenty-two years as a working Gothicist, I would like to thank especially Andrew Smith (University of Sheffield); Ruth Heholt (Falmouth University); Matthew Gibson (University of Macau); John Strachan (Bath Spa University); Emily Alder (Napier University); Jillian Wingfield (University of Hertfordshire); Catherine Robinson (Bath Spa University); Clayton Mackenzie (Hong Kong Baptist University); Angela Wright (University of Sheffield); Ben Fisher (University of Mississippi); Alison Younger (Sunderland University); Marius Crişan (Universitatea de Vest din Timişoara); and two of my recent students who achieved much by a combination of hard work and scholarly commitment: Isabelle Poggiagliolmi and Bryony Currass. The final part of this book was written whilst I was on a research visit to Argentina and Chile. I’d very much like to thank the many academic colleagues who were so hospitable during my travels in

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South America, particularly Romàn Setton (Universidad del Cine, Buenos Aires); Magdalena Merbilháa Romo (Red Cultural, Santiago de Chile); Ana Maria Tomassini Aguirre (Villa Maria Academy, Santiago de Chile); and Jonathan Collao Rudillo (Escuela de Música Papageno, Villarrica, Chile). Finally, as always, I would like to express my gratitude for the consistent support of all my friends and family, particularly my Uncle Tom (to whom this book is dedicated) and my cousins, but also Carol and Ian Ward, Brian Killey, Jnr, Kevin Wheeler and Paula Barry, Karen, Chris, Emily and Thomas Wilson, Colin Edwards, Pat Main and Brian Weston. William Hughes, Santiago de Chile

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For Tom Hughes, with love.

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Introduction

How to Use this Book Key Concepts in the Gothic has been written to fulfil two main functions. It may serve, on the one hand, as a comprehensive introduction to the Gothic for readers of all levels who are unfamiliar with the breadth and history of this most pervasive – and mutable – of literary genres. The core of Key Concepts in the Gothic – an alphabetically ordered glossary of terms and concepts – provides an immediate and accessible introduction to the historical, critical and theoretical terms which the student will encounter when studying any aspect of the genre from the mid-eighteenth century to the present day. The appended summaries of the central theoretical approaches, likewise, will assist the reader new to Gothic in an understanding of how critics have historically interrogated the genre and, indeed, of how the genre has itself been instrumental in informing the development of critical theory across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The summaries of fifteen selected and representative generic texts are intended to further enhance the reader’s encounter with the Gothic, by not merely presenting the key themes of the genre in some of their clearest incarnations but also introducing some accessible but less-familiar fictions as a foil to the canonical texts most commonly encountered in criticism. Key Concepts in the Gothic is emphatically not, however, an introductory work that will become redundant as the reader becomes more familiar with the genre. The second function of the current volume is one of enduring relevance upon the reader’s reference shelf. In addition to the essential critical and theoretical terms requisite for any critic of the Gothic, the glossary incorporates definitions of many obscure words and concepts which the reader will encounter in Gothic texts from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. These include precise definitions of terms derived from architecture, book history, folklore, medicine and pathology, occultism and theology, as

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well as more recent terms associated with, for example, critical theory, environmentalism and film studies. Key Concepts in the Gothic, likewise, systematically cross-references the recurrent scenarios and conventions characteristic of the genre, in order to enable the reader to understand how Gothic functions as a richly intertextual and selfreferential cultural environment. For this reason, many of the definitions in the central glossary will point the reader not merely to other entries within that section of the book, but also to representative texts including and beyond the fifteen key works examined at length later in the book. The breadth, as well as the rigorous depth, of Key Concepts in the Gothic thus facilitates its retention as a highly quotable resource for continued studies in the genre at undergraduate level and, indeed, beyond. It contains succinct and quotable definitions which will support your reading of the Gothic, and which you are encouraged to interrogate and challenge in your own scholarship – whatever level it is pursued at. Gothic is a progressive, as well as a frequently subversive, form of writing. It continues to develop, and has long exceeded any temporary boundaries that may have confined it solely to literary production. As an active reader, you are a participant in the ongoing critical interrogation of a cultural tradition which was founded, in relative obscurity, in the mid-eighteenth century. Though Key Concepts in the Gothic will provide the reader with authoritative definitions of essential terms associated with the genre and its criticism, the book is also designed to allow connections to be made across the whole field of Gothic studies. For this reason, each entry in the A-Z of Key Concepts and Terms has been cross-referenced with others elsewhere in the glossary. These cross-references are given in bold. The dates of birth and death for authors, poets, dramatists and historical figures are given in parentheses within the A-Z of Key Concepts and Terms, as are the first publication dates of named fictional texts. This will, likewise, facilitate the reader’s understanding of how the authors and recurrent preoccupations of Gothic interrelate across the ongoing development of the genre. Whilst dates of first publication are also supplied for critical and other theoretical works named in Key Concepts in the Gothic, the dates of birth and death associated with their authors are not included within the A-Z of Key Concepts and Terms. A brief history of specifically Gothic criticism forms part of this introduction, though any broader chronology

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of the development of literary criticism and theory must necessarily be sought in a specialist work dedicated to that subject.1 A Short History of Gothic The cultural origins of Gothic precede its incarnation as a literary genre. The term itself has two relevant connotations which provide a central context as to why this specific and somewhat unfashionable word became applied to what was, initially, a voguish and minor form of writing in the mid-eighteenth century. The term ‘Gothic’ is derived from the name of a warlike Germanic people whose destructive activities in the declining years of the Roman Empire are popularly considered to have initiated that period in European history known as the Dark Ages.2 The term accrued highly political and overwhelmingly negative implications in later centuries – the historical Goths were assumed (not always correctly) to be culturally primitive, superstitious and not regulated by law: the metaphorical Goths within eighteenth- and nineteenth-century civilisation were, likewise, regarded as preferring the darkness of the past to the Enlightenment of the present, thereby occupying a regressive and deviant position in culture, manners and politics rather than a progressive one. ‘Gothic’, though, refers also to a style of northern European architecture that flourished from the twelfth century ce.3 Herein lies the paradox of the term, for if the tribal name of the Goths carries a negative cultural charge comparable to that of the Vandals – another European tribe associated with the decline of the Roman Empire – Gothic architecture is frequently positivised as a northern European counterpart to the Hellenism of Romanesque classicism. Certainly, in the nineteenth century, a deliberately imposed Gothic revival in building design – as expressed, for example, through Commissioner’s Gothic churches and the rebuilt Houses of Parliament – functioned, with scant regard to that architectural style’s Continental and Roman Catholic origins, to visibly signify a Protestant and nationalistic demarcation between the island nation of Britain and the Other of the adjacent Continent of Europe.4 It is this pattern of conflation and confusion that both facilitates and complicates the application of the term ‘Gothic’ to the first nominally termed work in the genre, The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole (1717–97), in its two successive editions of 1764 and 1765.5 Walpole’s comparatively short narrative is a perplexing compromise.

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It is an imaginative exercise in eighteenth-century antiquarianism but ensheathes a purportedly Dark Ages manuscript. The rhetoric is alternately disdainful of, and fascinated with, Roman Catholicism. It is a moral tale, punctuated by immoral incidents, and the restoration of conventional morality is achieved through ghostly rather than divine intervention. Certainly, The Castle of Otranto establishes many of the conventions which continue to punctuate Gothic works to the present day, though it should be noted that Walpole’s idiosyncrasies, enduringly influential as they are, have never functioned as defining limitations upon a novelistic genre to which he did not return in later life. Indeed, though The Castle of Otranto was repeatedly – and often clumsily – imitated and pirated across the latter part of the eighteenth century, subsequent authors have characteristically exhibited a discernible willingness to exceed the early landmarks of the Gothic even where they acknowledge and reproduce them. What is commonly known as the first wave of Gothic fiction – a critical generalisation that refers nominally to works published between 1764 and 1818 – imbricates Walpole’s ghost-populated Continental Dark Ages with, variously, more historically recent, geographically close, and wholly human exercises in terror and horror. Indeed, these latter terms, which are bound up also in the pervasive aesthetic theory of the Sublime, become part of the mechanism through which the perceived quality of Gothic fictions may be evaluated. Though Gothic was popular in both originally crafted novels and derivatively produced blue books across the eighteenth century and well into the nineteenth – in part because of its inclusion in the stock of circulating libraries – there was a discernible gap between the lengthy and reflective multiple-volume novels produced by ‘reputable’ authors and the considerably shorter works produced cheaply by a popular press unregulated by copyright legislation. It is the lingering and dubious reputation of this latter publishing subculture, with its taste for plagiarism and spectacle, that has almost certainly contributed to the – historical but on occasion still encountered – academic disdain for Gothic. Perversely, these shorter texts are today seldom read, even by committed critics of the genre, whilst the more introspective and structured novels which they ostensibly imitated, have survived to become part of the canon of twenty-first-century anglophone criticism. Gothic is now, arguably, as respectable as Romanticism – this latter being, ironically, a tradition which frequently drew upon Gothic precedents in the supernatural, the irrational and the Sublime.

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It is the nineteenth century, though, that illustrates the full paradox of Gothic’s differential development, not merely in its originating anglophone environment but also globally – albeit in a world where imperialism characteristically imposed a defining domestic linguistic culture upon distant subaltern territories. It is in the nineteenth century that Gothic is most effectively disseminated beyond the physical boundaries of the British Isles and, through both translation and original writing, outside of the linguistic curtilage of the English language. Identifiably generic anglophone Gothic was, admittedly, being written in the United States before the close of the eighteenth century, though readers in the English-speaking colonies of the British Empire were to rely upon imported works until after the first quarter of the nineteenth century.6 The importance of technological and logistical development should not be understated here. Gothic entered international literacy by way of commercial trade routes, using new technologies in both printing and the manufacturing of cheap paper. Strangely, the rise of commercial Gothic still remains academically underexplored as a phenomenon in pre-Victorian book history.7 It is in the nineteenth century, furthermore, that Gothic becomes more widely disseminated not merely in the geographical and linguistic sense but also in terms of its subtle incorporation into the language and structure of other literary genres. The stylistics of Gothic were historically – and continue to be – both highly adaptable and singularly responsive to the needs of any form of writing that expresses deviance, whether this latter indicates a departure from moral codes, from statute law or from conventional human corporeality. Gothic’s historical implication within explorations of the monstrous and the perceptibly abnormal facilitates its insertion into the nascent popular genres of the nineteenth century, most notably crime fiction and science fiction. If these genres characteristically eschew the supernatural content so popular within First-Wave Gothic, they make extensive use of Gothicised modes of characterisation and geographical description and implicate also another defining element of Gothic since the time of Walpole: the disruptive potential that the past may have in the present day. History, indeed, should be regarded as a central premise of Gothic and, arguably, as an equal to the supernatural and the religious as evidence of a generic Gothic heritage.8 Questions of ancestry, legitimacy and descent rank co-equal with historical crimes and misappropriations as motivations for both Gothic and criminal fictions, just as the

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contemporary world functions as an implicit memory to underwrite fantasies of the future. In the nineteenth century, whether in the form of discrete generic fiction or else as a discernible stylistic trace within other forms of writing, Gothic moved progressively into the near or actual contemporary. It is this shift in temporality – prevalent but not absolute – that allows Gothic to more directly address contemporary issues regarding individual or institutional abuses of power through spectacular incidents that may simultaneously provoke both vicarious enjoyment and moral indignation. It is thus that Gothic becomes a context for melodrama and the sensation novel, whilst still maintaining its own secular and supernatural integrity through both full-length novels and the related genre of the ghost story across the Victorian period and into the Edwardian and the Georgian.9 It is something of a critical commonplace that Gothic enters a form of dormancy following the First World War, at a time when the actual and recent memory of industrialised, dehumanising violence arguably outweighed the horrors of any imagined trauma. Gothic, however, enjoyed a perceptible place in mobilising the ongoing pain and hopelessness of international conflict as well as its mental and physical consequences. It is in the inter-war period that Gothic enters a wider – and, in the eyes of some, less discerning – cultural field, becoming implicated in both popular cinema and the rising ‘pulp’ tradition of (particularly US) fiction. The genre thus retained its function as a vehicle through which cultural – as well as individual – monstrosity might be expressed, and this element of Gothic persisted through the Second World War and into the period of the Cold War. If science fiction is popularly regarded as the central conduit through which US writers and auteurs, in particular, mobilised a fear of the Communist Other, the demons of that genre, as well as those of many other popular modes of writing, drew heavily on Gothicised representations of monstrosity, alienation and apocalypse. Cinema, most notably, is a form of cultural communication with the capacity to inform comprehensively at a time when shortages of time and paper inhibit the consumption of fiction. This is not to suggest, though, that the novel had become an irrelevance in the twentieth century. Indeed, as in the previous century, technological and material changes in the book industry and the rise of an international marketplace for anglophone Gothic facilitated something of a revival in the fortunes of novelistic fiction within the genre. If Gothic was one of the genres which could maintain a reader’s

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interest over several hundred pages, it was likewise one that lent itself to what was then a relatively new interfacing of written original and cinematic adaptation. Anglo-American cinema in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, it should be noted, still deployed the tried and proven components of the historical genre, with vampires, wolfmen, mummies and the Frankenstein monster within the limitations imposed by national censorship regimes. The 1970s, though, initiated the adaptation of contemporary narratives by still-active authors, in the form of either full-length cinematic features or television mini-series. This development would seem to have had something of a reciprocal effect, with consumers of one incarnation of the text becoming curious about the other. The authors, on occasion, were as involved in the production of the adaptation as the auteurs. The millennial consciousness of the closing quarter of the twentieth century, with its shifting balance between optimism and pessimism, found an ideal conduit in Gothic. This was the age, after all, of the so-called Millennium Bug, the very prospect of which proclaimed the apparent powerlessness of modern, technological society. If actual narratives of social unease were surprisingly sparse in this period, much was made of how a hedonistic youth culture might arise at the prospect of a dying civilisation. At the millennium, as at the Victorian fin de siècle, absinthe returned as an emblem of decadent counterculture and detached aestheticism in direct reaction to the obsessive working practices associated with, if not neoliberalism, then the whole purposeful ethic of Thatcherism and Reaganomics. It is the less-certain world of the twenty-first century, with its extremes of wealth and poverty, its dehumanising of immigrant or refugee populations, its juxtaposition of strident nationalisms with pervasive globalisation, that has no doubt fuelled the current vogue for zombies, these being a perfect emblem both of mindless consumption and of utter detachment from social collectivity. Indeed, it is possible to consider the parallel rise of texts – written, televisual and cinematic – which depict communities or families of astute, mutually supportive vampires and werewolves as vocalising a more positive alternative to zombie apocalypse.10 The Gothic thus remains a vibrant and still mutable cultural force in the first quarter of the twenty-first century. It is, significantly, a form of fantasy which seems more than ever to have become implicated in social and political discourse. The genre’s relative position in culture has been modified somewhat by its gradual – and, sometimes, grudging – acceptance as a genre worthy of serious academic study.

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Though Gothic remains an overwhelmingly popular form of writing, in the broadest sense of that term, it is one that successfully interfaces the academic and the non-academic, the historical and the contemporary, and the familiar in juxtaposition to the innovative. Once summarily dismissed as ephemeral by criticism and pedagogy, Gothic is now at the very centre of cultural debate. A Short History of Gothic Criticism Criticism of the Gothic is almost as old as the genre itself: Horace Walpole prefaced the second edition of The Castle of Otranto (1765) with a statement that clarified the aesthetic of its precursor. Beyond this, much of the earlier criticism of the genre was conducted in the journals of the day, frequently by creative writers such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834). In 1818, the year which conventionally marks the close of First-Wave Gothic writing, Coleridge published two landmark essays, ‘The Gothic Mind’ and ‘Gothic Literature and Art’. ‘On the Supernatural in Poetry’ by Ann Radcliffe (1764–1823), the first major theoretical reflection upon the theory of the Sublime in relation to Gothic since the time of Edmund Burke (1729–97), was published posthumously in 1826.11 Reviewing and belles lettres remained the primary mode of interrogating and exploring Gothic stylistics across the nineteenth century, and it was not until the early twentieth century that a small body of texts were published which both surveyed the genre and attempted to understand its consistency and persistence. These included The Supernatural in Modern English Fiction (1917) by Dorothy Scarborough, The Tale of Terror (1921) by Edith Birkhead, and the unjustly neglected Horace Walpole and the English Novel (1934) by the Indian scholar Kewal Krishna Mehrota.12 The work of the occultist and bibliophile Montague Summers (1880– 1948) should also be noted here, though his scholarship, including The Gothic Quest (1938) and A Gothic Bibliography (1940), is idiosyncratic and, on occasion, bibliographically unreliable.13 Modern academic criticism, though pioneered by Dorothy Scarborough in the inter-war period, is a phenomenon associated primarily with the decades following the Second World War. This phase of the critical archive was, again, initiated with a survey volume, the somewhat derivative The Gothic Flame (1957) by Devendra Prasad Varma.14 Historically expansive works such as these continue to exercise considerable influence over modern Gothic scholarship, and

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if The Literature of Terror (1980) by David Punter should rightly be regarded as a – possibly the – major landmark in the development of a systematic and theoretically informed Gothic scholarship, that work’s lead has been followed in subsequent years by a number of worthy surveys by critics such as Fred Botting, Carol Margaret Davison, Jarlath Killeen and Andrew Smith.15 Botting deserves particular acknowledgement, with his relatively short study Gothic (1996) exercising a considerable influence over undergraduate perceptions of the genre.16 Survey volumes represent the breadth of the genre’s possibilities. The minutiae of Gothic specialisms, though often explored in singleauthor monographs, are more diversely developed in short articles published across the spectrum of scholarly journals and in the plethora of edited essay collections that have discussed the genre since the seminal dissertation ‘Supernatural Horror in Literature’ (1927) by H. P. Lovecraft (1890–1937).17 It was in the scholarly journals of the 1960s and the 1970s that feminism began to explore the genre. Psychobiography and psychoanalysis, likewise, were applied to Gothic texts in the same period. It was not, however, until 1999 that a discrete academic journal, Gothic Studies, was established as a central forum through which to facilitate the development of criticism of the genre. Gothic criticism continues to develop across all of these rhetorical formats, with recent monographs, essay collections and individual journal articles applying contemporary theory to historical as well as recently published texts. Theory has become central to the study of Gothic in the twenty-first century, an epistemological development acknowledged by a 2009 special issue of Gothic Studies, entitled ‘Theorising the Gothic’ and guest-edited by two sometime presidents of the International Gothic Association, Jerrold E. Hogle and Andrew Smith.18 This seminal collection, with its thoughtful introduction, crystallised the genre’s encounter with theory at the close of the first decade of the twenty-first century. As well as a reassessment of familiar yet still developing approaches to the genre, such as the Female Gothic and postcolonial theory, the issue included landmark readings of the influence of new technologies, via cybergothic, the rise of queer theory, and the influence of individual philosophers and critics such as Maurice Blanchot, Gilles Deleuze, Fredric Jameson and Jacques Lacan. Subsequent developments have applied the tenets of disability studies and ecocriticism to the genre.19 Gothic criticism and Gothic

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creativity are now intimate and exist in a reciprocal relationship in which each underwrites the development of the other. Gothic authors are now highly aware of how criticism has interpreted, in both historical and contemporary terms, their chosen genre. Likewise, critics are notably proactive in interpreting contemporary works as active participants in the genre’s stylistics. The future for Gothic would thus seem to be one of fruitful interaction between the creative and the critical, and it is the student of the genre who is likely to be the central beneficiary of this dark bounty so openly proclaimed. Notes 1. See, for example, Julian Wolfreys, Kenneth Womack and Ruth Robbins, eds, Key Concepts in Literary Theory, 3rd edn. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006, pp. 107–87. 2. See Robin Sowerby, ‘The Goths in History and Pre-Gothic Gothic’, in David Punter, ed., A New Companion to the Gothic. Oxford: WileyBlackwell, 2012, pp. 25–37. 3. See James Stevens Curl, ‘Architecture, Gothic’, in William Hughes, David Punter and Andrew Smith, eds, The Encyclopedia of Gothic. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013, 2 vols, vol. 1, pp. 38–40. 4. See James Stevens Curl, ‘Architecture, Gothic Revival’, in Hughes et al. The Encyclopedia of Gothic, vol. 1, pp. 40–4. 5. The prefacing of these two editions is highly significant and, in many respects, causes them to function in context as discrete works. See Emma Clery, ‘Against Gothic’, in Allan Lloyd Smith and Victor Sage, eds, Gothick Origins and Innovations. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1994, pp. 34–43. 6. Carol Margaret Davison, ‘Charles Brockden Brown: Godfather of the American Gothic’, in Charles Crow, ed., A Companion to American Gothic. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2014, pp. 110–23. 7. A rare exception to this is Franz Potter, The History of Gothic Publishing, 1800–1835: Exhuming the Trade. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2005. 8. Cf. Robert Mighall, A Geography of Victorian Gothic Fiction: Mapping History’s Nightmares. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999, pp. xiv–xix. 9. For an authoritative survey of this crucial subgenre see Andrew Smith, The Ghost Story, 1840–1920: A Cultural History. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010. 10. See Angela Tenga and Elizabeth Zimmerman, ‘Vampire Gentlemen and Zombie Beasts: A Rendering of True Monstrosity’, Gothic Studies, 15/1 (May 2013), 76–87.

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11. See E. J. Clery and Robert Miles, eds, Gothic Documents: A Sourcebook, 1700–1820. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000, pp. 95–8, 163–72. 12. Dorothy Scarborough, The Supernatural in Modern English Fiction. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1917; Edith Birkhead, The Tale of Terror: A Study of the Gothic Romance. London: Constable, 1921; Kewal Krishna Mehrota, Horace Walpole and the English Novel: A Study of the Influence of The Castle of Otranto. Oxford: Blackwell, 1934. 13. Montague Summers, The Gothic Quest: A History of the Gothic Novel. London: Fortune Press, 1938; A Gothic Bibliography. London: Fortune Press, 1940. 14. Devendra Prasad Varma, The Gothic Flame, Being a History of the Gothic Novel in England, its Origins, Efflorescence, Disintegration and Residuary Influences. London: Barker, 1957. 15. David Punter, The Literature of Terror. London: Longman, 1980; Carol Margaret Davison, Gothic Literature 1764–1824. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2009; Jarlath Killeen, Gothic Literature, 1825–1912. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2009; Andrew Smith, Gothic Literature. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007. 16. Fred Botting, Gothic. London: Routledge, 1996. 17. H. P. Lovecraft, ‘Supernatural Horror in Literature’, The Recluse, 1 (1927), 23–59. 18. Jerrold E. Hogle and Andrew Smith, eds, ‘Theorising the Gothic’, Gothic Studies, 11/1 (May 2009), 1–133. 19. Ruth Bienstock Anolik, ed., Demons of the Body and Mind: Essays on Disability in Gothic Literature. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2010; Andrew Smith and William Hughes, eds, Ecogothic. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013.

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A-Z of Key Concepts and Terms

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A Abbey An ecclesiastical foundation which, typically, is headed by an abbot or abbess who presides over a community of monks or nuns. The organisation of such institutions is Roman Catholic in its origins, though communities based upon monasticism were reintroduced to some branches of Anglo-Catholic Protestantism in the nineteenth century. The culture of seclusion traditionally associated with such institutions no doubt underwrites an abiding generic mythology which sees them, from the time of First-Wave Gothic, characteristically as places of secrecy and repression, rather than of prayerful devotion. Positive portrayals of the abbey or convent as a place of asylum are to be found in works as diverse as The Castle of Otranto (1764) by Horace Walpole (1717–97) and Dracula (1897) by Bram Stoker (1847–1912), though these form a minority. Ab-human First used by William Hope Hodgson (1877–1918) in 1910, this term is applied to those nominally human bodies whose existence can no longer be satisfactorily explained or contained by conventional definitions of that species. The concept implicates, most obviously, the perceived degeneration of the human into the bestial (for example, the werewolf or beastman), but may also be applied to disturbing transitions between the living body and its dead counterpart (such as the vampire or the zombie), and to the intimate interfacing of living tissue and machine components in the hybrid cyborg bodies of cyberpunk. It is also frequently applied to those mutations of the corporeal self into other substances such as elemental slime or fungoid matter in both Gothic and science fiction. The ab-human is closely allied to both the uncanny and hybridity in terms of the crisis of perception it can generate, though the frequently spectacular dissolution of the borders of human physiological integrity into liquids and semi-solids connects it also to abjection. Gothic criticism frequently associates the ab-human with the nineteenth-century fin de siècle, and with writers influenced by British modernism. Abjection Theorised by Julia Kristeva in the influential study Powers of Horror (1980, trans. 1982), the concept of abjection radically revises the binary paradigm of self and other customarily associated with earlier psychoanalytical thought. For Kristeva,

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the psychological boundary that conventionally demarcates the two is illusory: the other is not merely that which may be both desired and feared by the self, but frequently forms part of that self. This complicates the concept of taboo generally, and those taboos associated with the body in particular. Recognition that the body is in itself almost always at the point of becoming taboo creates a state of psychological unease premised upon the realisation that the body’s wholeness and integrity are illusory, that it is always ill, unclean and potentially dangerous to itself and those around it. For Kristeva, the most graphic demonstration of this tense relationship between perceiving psychology and corporeal pathology is to be found in abiding attitudes to those bodily secretions naturally produced as a consequence of ongoing human existence. The living body is constantly engaged in abjecting – that is, expelling or rejecting – certain substances from out of its supposedly healthy wholeness. These substances, in many cases, may become pathological or poisonous if retained by the body – though they form reminders also of both the fragmentation and mortality of human tissue and the fragility of the boundaries of the self. In no specific order of precedence, the conventional abject substances are blood (both circulatory and menstrual), tears, saliva, perspiration, urine, excrement, mucus, pus and semen, to which may be added also any organic component which has been severed or extracted from the corporeal wholeness. Such things are liminal – they were once intimate to the body, but are integral to it no longer – and their perceived presence as part of the not-I may be recognised as being truly uncanny. By association, artificial limbs and other prostheses may partake of the psychological unease associated with abjection, as may the wounds left by injury, surgery or disease. Childbirth, a liminal state in which the child is poised between organic association and independent existence, is likewise an abject state for both parties – and the secretions of parturition (amniotic fluid, blood, placental expulsion) are likewise fearfully abject. Absinthe A distilled alcoholic beverage containing the psychoactive substance thujone, absinthe was popular across Continental Europe throughout the long nineteenth century. Particularly favoured by artistic culture at the Victorian fin de siècle, ‘the Green Fairy’ became the target of anti-alcohol campaigns and moral crusades, and was banned in its heartlands of Switzerland

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and France in 1910 and 1915 respectively. The taste for absinthe was revived at the millennium in both Europe and the US, largely because of its ostensible association with decadence and sexual licence. Absolution An integral part of Penance, one of the seven sacraments accepted as ritually canonical within Roman Catholicism. The rite of the confessional empowers the presiding priest or monk to absolve (or forgive) the penitent of his or her sin, effectively freeing them from impending punishment at the hand of the Deity. African-American Gothic This important tradition within American Gothic is premised, in its initial Victorian incarnation, upon the immediate and brutal horrors of slavery but focuses, in more recent publications, upon the enduring heritage of slave-owning culture. Early Gothic works by African-American authors, such as The Bondwoman’s Narrative (1850s) by Hannah Crafts (dates not known) and Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861) by Harriet Jacobs (1813–97), mobilise the conventions of the Female Gothic – though not always the supernatural – in order to communicate the repressive and often rapacious environments of both the plantation and the plantation house. In such fictions, the archaic European locations of First-Wave Gothic were discarded in favour of contemporary American locales. These American locales characteristically lack the sublime grandeur of their European counterparts, and the incidents of peril and confinement inflicted upon the enslaved protagonists rarely generate that thoughtfulness, characteristic of Romanticism, so often associated with the persecuted heroine of First-Wave Gothic. Though slavery was abolished across the US in 1865, the residual memory of its practices, languages and prejudices continues to resonate throughout American culture into the twenty-first century. As W. E. B. Du Bois suggests in the seminal sociological study The Souls of Black Folk (1903), the self-perception of the African-American is one of ‘double consciousness’ – of being simultaneously of historical African heritage and contemporary American citizenship. As something of a cultural doppelganger, it may be that the African-American is forced at times to perceive the self through the lens of a racial identity not always wholly empathetic to post-slavery African-American aspirations. This tense relationship with history may be emblematised in works

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such as Cane (1923) by Jean Toomer (1894–1967), where the plantations of the American South have been superseded by a factory system which brutalises both white and black. Miscegenation is a theme here, as it is in later works such as Plum Bun (1929) by Jessie Fauset (1882–1961), and this, with the implications of a nation divided by colour as well as shackled by history, links African-American Gothic to the Southern Gothic tradition of the twentieth century. African-American Gothic persists not merely in near-contemporary fiction – witness the works of Toni Morrison (1931–), most notably Beloved (1987), and A Visitation of Spirits (1996) by Randall Kenan (1963–) – but also in its discernible influence on Southern Gothic cinema, as well as on the Blaxploitation tradition that generated Gothic productions such as Blacula (1972) and Blade (1998). AIDS A debilitative physical condition transferable through blood and blood-contaminated bodily secretions, Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome was first formally documented in Congo in 1959, the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) which causes AIDS being identified in 1986. Because the earliest symptoms were observed in sexually active homosexual men, the condition was first delineated in the US through the acronym GRID or Gay-Related Immune Deficiency – this term and its fallout undoubtedly facilitating a homophobic panic on the one hand, and a renewed sense of resistant and coherent gay community on the other. AIDS has attained an inevitable presence in Queer Gothic, most notably in the fiction of Will Self (1961–) and Poppy Z. Brite (1967–), two authors who address the potential apocalypse that might be generated by an infected individual utilising HIV as a weapon of revenge against society. The sanguine practices of vampirism are, likewise, now implicated within the modern as well as historical taboos associated with both blood and semen, and the predatory, promiscuous vampire has been frequently equated – implicitly as well as explicitly – with the infected gay man in recent years. Alchemy The putative ancestor of modern chemistry, medieval alchemy was a pseudoscientific and hermetic science characteristically preoccupied with the search for the Philosopher’s Stone (through which base metals might be transmuted to gold), for the Elixir of Life and for a medical panacea. It shares many attributes with cabbalism.

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Alienist A nineteenth-century term for a medical professional working within the asylum system and treating lunacy. Allegory The use of symbols or coded gestures to convey an ulterior meaning beyond that of the literal or mimetic plot. In Gothic, the typically moral imperative associated with allegory has on occasions been strategically deployed in order to effectively defend the text from hostile criticism: the Preface to the first edition of The Castle of Otranto (1764) by Horace Walpole (1717–97), for example, dwells upon that work’s ostensible relation to a Biblical moral. Alternative Histories This is a branch of speculative writing, once aligned with science fiction but now increasingly identifiable as a minor genre in its own right. Fictions in this tradition envisage worlds of the near past, present or impending futures that are uncanny in the sense that their social, political, geographical or technological features are simultaneously recognisable and yet perceptibly strange. Such works may premise a world in which a specific, defining event has not occurred: the victory, rather than defeat, of Germany in 1945, for example, underwrites much Nazi Gothic. Other texts may respond to profound cultural fears regarding the future of civilisation or the fragility of the nation state by imagining the effect of plagues or natural catastrophes: one might consider here, for example, The Last Man (1826) by Mary Shelley (1797–1851) or The Burning World (1964) by J. G. Ballard (1930–2009), both of which might also be categorised under the heading of ecogothic. Alterative histories also mobilise many texts in the steampunk genre, where grotesque modifications to familiar technology may interrogate the conventional relationships that pertain between humanity, manufactured objects and the environment. American Gothic The earliest exponents of Gothic style in the United States necessarily depended upon European paradigms to develop their nascent recension of the genre. Consequentially, early works in the tradition drew upon many of the preoccupations of British First-Wave Gothic, particularly in those narratives that depict contentious relationships predicated upon lineage and familial descent, financial transactions or disputed ownership. From its earliest days, though, the New World incarnation of the genre characteristically projected its fictions in near-contemporary times and upon a backdrop of environments

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which were identifiably American rather than European. For this reason, American Gothic might be said to have enjoyed a perceptibly discrete existence from the eighteenth-century fin de siècle, when the writings of Charles Brockden Brown (1771– 1810) effectively stabilised its thematic paradigm, parts of which still endure to the present day. The recurrent features of that paradigm arguably cluster around certain issues of environment, race, religion and national destiny which lend themselves to the expression of both cultural unease and personal aspiration. With regard to environment, American Gothic characteristically balances its mythologies between the wilderness and the city. From the time of Brown, the former has been predicated as a hostile adjunct to more settled regions, its indigenous population only partially contained and always potentially belligerent, its environmental anarchy ready to impinge upon the ostensible order represented by the farm, the plantation and the city. As is often the case in colonial Gothic, immersion in such an environment may compromise the identity of the settler, and provoke episodes of ‘savage’ behaviour incommensurate with civilised culture. Wilderness is also a key feature of Canadian Gothic. Away from the wilderness, US Gothic authors pioneered the development of a recognisable urban Gothic in which cities are represented not as icons of progress and aspiration but as stifling repositories of restrictive custom and stagnant demography. Brown’s plague-beset cities of the 1790s are echoed by the mid-nineteenth-century Philadelphia of George Lippard (1822–54), and recalled in the decaying and backward-looking settlements of twentieth-century New England Gothic fictionalised by writers from H. P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) to Stephen King (1947–). Gotham City, the backdrop to the 1940s Batman graphic novels, is likewise a labyrinthine, nocturnal New York. As a recurrent motif, the Gothicised city represents also a component of that phase of (for the most part) twentieth- and post-twentieth-century US Gothic concerned with the projected threats to, and decline of, national identity and aspiration. Perceptibly aligned with the traditions of Gothic apocalypse and alternative histories, these works emphasise the apparent fragility not merely of US power specifically but also, more broadly, of civil society itself. Drawing on energies analogous to the

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invasion motifs often found in European imperial Gothic, these texts characteristically imagine a future where formerly secure national boundaries have been breached by terrestrial or otherworld aliens, where a still familiar but evidently distorted culture has, variously, succeeded modern capitalism or else accelerated it into a competitive, mutually destructive individualism. The natural catastrophes of ecogothic – floods, ice ages, plagues, droughts – likewise underwrite narratives of social breakdown, and the rootlessness of the survivors, who often represent in their composition the multiracial nature of US society, should be seen as a graphic contrast to those pioneer mythologies of self-improvement culturally associated with the settlement of the western portion of North America. The comparatively recent vogue for zombie apocalypses may, likewise, be viewed as an aspect of this tendency, where the struggles of the individual survivor, or the persistence of the survivor community, are key motifs. As an aspect of what is essentially an ongoing myth of national identity, destiny and improvement, survivor narratives such as these variously affirm, or fearfully signal the decline of, the pioneer imperative in US culture. The puritan heritage of settler culture is acknowledged in the Protestant consciousness of early American Gothic. Where British Gothic is often overtly sectarian, demonising the Roman Catholic Other, US writers tended instead to concentrate upon the self-scrutiny and moral policing associated with Reformed Christianity. The novels and short fiction of Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–64) – most notably The Scarlet Letter (1850) – are often deployed in criticism to represent this often destructive introspection, though the manner in which unexpiated guilt may lead to psychological obsession is discernible in, among others, the writings of Edgar Allan Poe (1809–49) and Herman Melville (1819–91). The cultural secularisation of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries has, likewise, prompted a renewed introspection of faith, albeit one associated with the actual existence of a presiding deity. Interview with the Vampire (1976) and The Vampire Lestat (1985) by Anne Rice (1941–), for example, embody an implicit commentary upon the nature of guilt in a world no longer governed by a punitive or redemptive deity. A further significant demarcation between the British and American Gothic traditions is the protracted engagement with

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racial issues characteristic of the latter. In early US Gothic the racial Other was an indigenous population, dispossessed, marginalised and scarcely understood. Though the threat of impending violence once associated with Native American culture in earlier fiction has now all but disappeared in contemporary US Gothic, the powerful imagery of indigenous religion continues to haunt the genre, not merely in the form of an alternative spirituality capable of providing answers in a secular, post-Christian, world – witness, for example, Stephen King’s Pet Sematary (1983) – but also in the form of puissant entities such as the wendigo. In the nineteenth century, the fearful presence of the Native American was progressively eclipsed by that of the demonised Negro – Othered, like the Native American, not merely because of skin colour but also because of perceived differences in language and religion. The heritage of slavery, which was not formally abolished in the US until 1865, can be traced in twentieth-century Southern Gothic, with its preoccupation with the decay of white culture and fear of racial miscegenation. It is likewise present in African-American Gothic, a tradition very much concerned with disputed citizenship and the legacy of an often-violent past. This latter tradition should rightly be viewed as a counterpart to those other branches of American Gothic that concern themselves with the shifting stabilities of national identity and national destiny in the modern world. American Gothic is not homogeneous, and the variant qualities of its components testify to the heterogeneity of a culture still very much engaged in a debate regarding its own identity. Animals Animals serve two primary functions in Gothic fiction. Most frequently, they are associated with the ab-human, and operate as the counterpart of a human character engaged in an uncanny transition between species. While the werewolf provides, perhaps, the most obvious and persistent example of a literal transformation, perceptibly bestial behaviour may likewise signal a state of degeneration from civilised values – as demonstrated, for example, in ‘The Mark of the Beast’ (1890) by Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936). Animals are less frequently utilised in Gothic as an index of the presence of supernatural phenomena, their ability to see and hear at frequencies above or below human perception providing a quasi-scientific justification for their deployment in fictional psychical research. Cats and dogs are conventionally

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the animals of preference for haunted house investigations, and their deployment is exemplified most notably in the systematic casework of the psychic doctor John Silence in ‘A Psychical Invasion’ (1908) by Algernon Blackwood (1869–1951). Anthropocene A term often encountered in ecocriticism and studies of ecohorror and the ecogothic, the Anthropocene is a term deployed to describe the current geological age, this being one in which human activity has been the dominant influence upon climate and the environment. Anthropomorphism The ascription of a human attribute or personality to a non-human entity. Though anthropomorphism is commonly deployed in order to effectively humanise the behaviour of animals, it may function also in ascribing some form of volition or motivation to objects and buildings. In Gothic, this may take the form of an object which is seen as cursed or else malignant in itself, independent of the will of its human possessor. Again, a haunted house may be constructed as having a personality expressed not merely by any specific ghost within its confines but also more broadly by the edifice itself: the Overlook Hotel in The Shining (1977) by Stephen King (1947–) is a representative example. Antiquarianism The study of antiquities – a popular pastime amongst the educated elite in eighteenth-century Britain – undoubtedly influenced the structure and style of First-Wave Gothic and its descendants. The genre’s effective founder, Horace Walpole (1717–97), was a collector of, and writer upon, both classical and British antiquities, and his preface to the first Gothic novel, The Castle of Otranto (1764), depicts the associated narrative as being based upon an ancient manuscript discovered in a provincial library. Walpole’s framing gesture is here analogous to those rhetorical processes whereby the provenance and authenticity of historical artefacts were proved to the satisfaction of the community of antiquarians through reference to commentaries, documents and scholarly authorities. In Gothic fiction, these authenticating gestures were further supplemented by the deployment of letters, testimonies and other forms of conventional evidence. In the nineteenth century, this evidential paradigm was to be developed further through the use of authoritative structures derived in particular from medicine and law, the ostensibly reliable testimony of these disciplines

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being deployed to validate otherwise unbelievable or unprecedented events. Anti-Semitism The sporadic anti-Semitism discernible in nineteenthcentury Gothic shares much of the rhetorical energy of the Christian sectarianism commonly encountered in First-Wave Gothic. Where, however, Roman Catholicism is characteristically deployed in eighteenth-century Gothic as an (often Continental) Other in opposition to domestic British Protestantism, the clichéd figure of the Jew is, in Victorian context, conventionally made to mobilise fears of an enemy within the national culture. The central issue here is one of cultural assimilation. An abiding prejudice suggests that though the Jewish population may often be tolerated within the national culture, it can never be regarded as an unexceptional and fully integrated component of that culture. A significant component of that prejudice is dependent, moreover, upon popular associations that connect Jewry with usury and irregular finance. Popular drama and fiction have done much to maintain the cliché of the financially exploitative Jew, as may be evidenced by the regular revivals of The Merchant of Venice (1600) by William Shakespeare (1564–1616) and such fictional villains as Fagin and Augustus Melmotte in Oliver Twist (1837–8) by Charles Dickens (1812–70) and The Way We Live Now (1875) by Anthony Trollope (1815–82), respectively. With such images as cultural commonplaces, it takes little imagination to reschedule the respectable and regulated Jewish financier into a shady private interest whose selfish machinations both infiltrate and control the familiar public institutions of finance and trade. One might note here how the eponymous villain of Dracula (1897) by Bram Stoker (1847–1912), though not actually Jewish, displays a number of clichéd features characteristic of anti-Semitic discourse. Stoker’s aquiline Count, indeed, hoards money, buys up property and wishes to move unseen amongst a population to whom he owes no racial or political allegiance. It is almost unnecessary to add that usury has long been demonised through comparison to the vampire. The abiding prejudices of anti-Semitism, however, are not confined to accusations of financial exploitation. In a rather subtle twist on the reverse-colonisation motif often found in colonial Gothic, the denizen-Jew has been on occasions accused of converting, either by force or by sexual seduction, the indigenous

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population to an adherence to his or her own religious and social practices. As well as Count Dracula’s transformation of those whom he predates upon into vampires, one might note here the implicit sexual (as well as financial) ownership of the eponymous heroine of Trilby (1894) by the eastern European Jew, Svengali, who overcomes his victim’s self-control by way of hypnotism. This novel by George du Maurier (1834–96) was notable too for its illustrations, also by the author, which depict Svengali through a range of physiognomical clichés associated with Judaism. The stateless and outcast nature of both Svengali and Dracula recalls also the legend of the Wandering Jew, a recurrent figure in both European folk culture and global anti-Semitism, and an ostensible index of the Christian Deity’s distaste for Jewry following the crucifixion of Christ. Apocalypse Apocalyptic fictions may be divided into two broad areas: those which fictionalise the progressive eclipse of human civilisation and those which envisage a more profound destruction of, variously, the sustaining ecosystem or the planet itself. The earliest work in the apocalyptic tradition is almost certainly the Biblically inflected French prose-poem Le Dernier Homme (1805; trans. 1806) by Jean-Baptiste Cousin de Grainville (1746–1805). The framing and content of Le Dernier Homme may well have influenced The Last Man (1826) by Mary Shelley (1797–1851), which envisaged a twenty-first-century Europe depopulated by plague and civil strife. The fragility of civil culture in the face of epidemic disease motivates many other works in the tradition, including The Scarlet Plague (1912) by Jack London (1876–1916) and Survivors (1976) by Terry Nation (1930–97). Ecological disaster is, likewise, the catalyst for social change in other apocalyptic fictions. One might note, for example, the unjustly neglected narrative of neo-feudal culture that is After London (1885) by Richard Jefferies (1848–87). Jefferies’ protracted vision of nature progressively encroaching upon formerly agricultural land anticipates ecogothic, though more spectacular visions of social structures greatly modified by catastrophic ecological change are to be found in later works such as The Night Land (1910) by William Hope Hodgson (1877–1918), or The Drowned World (1962) and The Burning World (1964) by J. G. Ballard (1930–2009), which strikingly anticipate the later ecocritical preoccupations of global warming and rising sea levels. The most contemporary recensions

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of apocalyptic Gothic may conveniently be divided into two main tendencies. The longest-established of these is that strand of writing that envisages a residual civilisation living upon limited resources under conditions analogous to those which might be found following a global nuclear conflict. In works such as The Road (2006) by Cormac McCarthy (1933–), the collapse of human culture is most graphically signalled by the resurgence of cannibalism in identifiable but still uncanny landscapes, and this disdain for the human species also underwrites the second tendency, that of the zombie apocalypse. This latter, popularised first by twentieth-century feature films such as Night of the Living Dead (1968) and Dawn of the Dead (1978), directed by George A. Romero (1940–2017), found renewed popularity in the twenty-first century through novels such as The Rising (2003) by Brian Keene (1967–), through serial graphic novels such as The Walking Dead (2003–), and by way of network televisual dramas. Apocalyptic Gothic shares many of the characteristics of science fiction, and tends to eschew the supernatural in favour of causations that stem from human activity or natural disaster. Apostasy In Gothic fiction, the act of renouncing religious faith has profound implications for both the mortal body and the immortal soul. The characteristic sectarianism of First-Wave Gothic stressed in particular the intolerant attitude of Roman Catholicism towards apostates, where the summary execution of the former believer conventionally forms a mere prelude to the protracted torture of Hell. Apostasy, in the definition of ecclesiastical judicial institutions such as the Inquisition, need not, however, be limited to a renouncing of Christ in favour of Satan or some other deity: to embrace Protestantism might equally render the apostate liable to the vengeful attention of the church. The damnation of the apostate may not invariably, however, be conducted in the confines of Satan’s kingdom. In some variants of the punishment which follows apostasy, the apostate is doomed to become a vampire, effectively tormenting himself through an ongoing predation upon humanity generally, and his own family specifically. The eponymous Gothic Hero of ‘The Giaour’ (1813) by Lord Byron (1788–1824) is so doomed, and there are suggestions also that the Count, in Dracula (1897) by Bram Stoker (1847–1912), has likewise been condemned to eternal vampirism in exchange for his education by Satan.

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Apotropaic An action (or, by extension, an object) supposedly having the power to avert an evil influence. Apotropaic acts include the Roman Catholic sign of the Cross, the uttering of specific prayers or incantations or the deployment of holy water. Arcana From a Latin root indicating things hidden or secret, the term ‘arcana’ is conventionally associated with the two component parts of tarot cards, namely the ‘court’ cards or Major Arcana and the four ‘suits’ of the Minor Arcana. The term is also occasionally applied to those metaphysical secrets characteristically pursued in alchemy and cabbalism. Archetype Though the term ‘archetype’ may popularly refer to the ‘original’ from which any character, plot or device derives, the term has a more specific meaning in Jungian psychology and its associated literary criticism. In this latter context, archetypes are those character types, settings, images and story patterns which are apparently embedded deep in a collective unconscious and thus shared by people across cultures. The stress frequently placed upon recurrent images in Jungian criticism makes its application to Gothic, a genre that has on occasions been associated with the repetition of a limited number of plots and character types, relatively easy – though analyses from this perspective have historically been, surprisingly, less prominent in Gothic criticism than those derived from Freudian psychoanalysis. Asian Gothic Asian Gothic is a literary and cinematic phenomenon premised upon cultural synergy. The cultures of Asia have long enjoyed a rich tradition of supernatural and fantastic fictions – though the oral and written narratives produced by the indigenous cultures of the east cannot, strictly speaking, be considered Gothic. It is the point at which these culturally discrete narratives make contact with the occident – either by their being translated for a western readership; or else by their being rewritten under a Gothic paradigm for recipients located within their original cultural context – that they become generically Gothic in the conventional sense of that term, derived as it is from English-speaking culture. Hence, for example, Japanese Gothic has a dual existence, its historical archive of indigenous ghost stories being translated for English-speaking readers by writers such as Lafcadio Hearn (1850–1904), its more recent cultural products being produced under artistic and aesthetic criteria determined in part by the conventions of anglophone cinema.

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Despite this effective palimpsest imposed upon indigenous culture, the spiritual thematics of Asian Gothic have proved notably resilient. A taste for animism, which draws on the lingering energies of indigenous religion, mobilises ghosts, spirits, demons and, on occasion, cursed objects with a vitality that far exceeds the monitory or punitive functions such things enjoy in western Gothic. As is often the case in colonial Gothic, such uncanny things may take over prosaic lives, reduce modern identities to primitive consciousness, disrupt the order of secular materialism and mobilise a personal, or on occasions communal, return to superstitious reverence. The conventions and preoccupations of postcolonial Gothic, likewise, may also be seen in Asian Gothic, most notably where twentieth- and twenty-first-century authors interrogate the legacy of empire and conquest. This would certainly seem to be the case in recent anglophone Indian Gothic, where the lingering and often ambivalent memory of British rule becomes associated with decaying buildings and residual social and linguistic conventions – the ghosts, as it were, of an imperial past. Though Gothic literatures are produced from many Asian cultures, the written field is dominated – so far as criticism is concerned, at least – by writings originating in India, Japan and Malaysia. Japan, though, dominates the cinematic field with a catalogue of generic horror films progressively popularised in the west by the success of Ringu (1998), directed by Hideo Nakata (1961–). Japanese horror cinema is at times analogous to that nation’s science fiction tradition, so pervasive is its alternate technophobia and technophilia. Other aspects of the Japanese tradition, though, centre upon what has often been termed ‘body horror’, emphasising both the abjection and the bloodiness of the damaged body, and the ab-human state of compromised physiology. There are significant horror cinema production centres located in Hong Kong, Indonesia, Korea, Singapore, Taiwan and Thailand, though Japan, which has welldeveloped commercial connections to western markets, remains the best-known source of Asian horror cinema. Asylum Historically, the physical curtilage of a church or abbey was considered an inviolable sanctuary, where those pursued by the law might find asylum, temporal power having no jurisdiction over ecclesiastical property. First-Wave Gothic made use of this convention (which was abolished across much of Europe by the

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sixteenth century), deploying it, for example, to protect the virginal heroine of The Castle of Otranto (1764) by Horace Walpole (1717–97) or to keep a fugitive assassin from justice in The Italian (1797) by Ann Radcliffe (1764–1823). As nineteenth-century Gothic progressively relocated its plots from the historical past to the near contemporary, the absolutist rule of the feudal tyrant was frequently replaced by the secular power wielded by professionals in medicine and law. Thus, the asylum – more correctly, the lunatic asylum – a medical institution to which individuals were committed by process of law, became capable of being interpreted as a repressive space whose inmates were characteristically as powerless as those formerly condemned to castle dungeons or the cellars of the Inquisition. Asylum abuse became a feature not merely of Gothic but also of sensation fiction, with false imprisonment within the walls of mental institutions being utilised in order to silence or dispossess sane individuals, especially women: Wilkie Collins (1824–89) produced perhaps the most celebrated example of this type of imprisonment in The Woman in White (1860). The inmates of such institutions, routinely silenced by their status as lunatics, became effectively defenceless in the face of medical abuse. Though sexual abuse may well have been a silent implication of legally sanctioned incarceration, the lunatic could as easily be made available for medical experimentation, a sort of human vivisection, at the hands of the asylum proprietor, whose conventional title of ‘mad doctor’ signified the ambivalence of his position: one might note here, for example, the introspection of Dr John Seward in Dracula (1897) by Bram Stoker (1847–1912), whilst he actively encouraged the lunacy of one of his patients. The position of the alienist in The Yellow Wallpaper (1892) by Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860–1935) is less extreme than that of Seward’s mad doctor, but remains profoundly disturbing in its ostensible balance of altruistic cure and scientific curiosity. Augustanism A phase of the neo-classical period in English letters (c.1660–c.1798), the so-called Augustan Age spanned the first half of the eighteenth century. Whilst drawing upon the thematic precedents set by classical Roman authors such as Virgil, Horace and Ovid, Augustan authors – such as Alexander Pope (1688–1744), Joseph Addison (1672–1719) and Jonathan Swift (1667–1745) – often emphasised in their writings the cultural

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importance of order and balance, qualities which First-Wave Gothic authors were to challenge from the mid-point of the eighteenth century. Australian Gothic The first novel to be published in Australia was the anonymously authored Gothic romance The Guardian (1838). This work struck something of a keynote for the earliest phase of Australian Gothic, in that it borrowed its structural paradigm from British Gothic and set its plots in Britain rather than in the colony itself. Ironically, Rosa Praed (1851–1935), the first Australian-born author to write a Gothic-inflected novel actually set in the colony – Outlaw and Lawmaker (1893) – was domiciled in England from 1875. Gothic, indeed, seems to have been more of an inflection for the Victorian and Edwardian Australian novel, rather than existing in any semblance of generic discreteness. One might consider here, for example, the Gothic imagery to be found in Tales of the Convict System (1892) by William Astley (1855–1911) and The Squatter’s Ward (1908) by Edward Sorenson (1869–1939). The genre was essentially moribund in Australian letters from the first decade of the twentieth century to the late 1960s, its revival in literary consciousness being signalled by the historical-Gothic novel Picnic at Hanging Rock (1967) by Joan Lindsay (1896–1984). More recent interventions in the genre include the generically intertextual work of Peter Carey (1943–) and the Southern Gothic-inflected novel And the Ass Saw the Angel (1989) by Nick Cave (1957–). Perhaps the most significant development in recent Australian Gothic, though, is the rise of a generic Gothic tradition located in the work of authors writing out of the indigenous population. One might note in particular here the work of Alexis Wright (1950–), with its interests in apocalypse and critical susceptibility to ecocriticism, and the postcolonial Gothic of Mudrooroo (1938–), some of whose writings embody a specific interrogation of the vampire motif in colonial context. Automatism The performance of actions unconsciously or subconsciously. Though this term may be used conventionally with reference to actions performed habitually during consciousness, it may also be applied to the apparently involuntary actions of those subjects whose will is abnegated by hypnotism. Autopsy The formal and surgical examination of a dead body in order to ascertain cause of death and, in some cases, the presence of

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physiological disorder, pathological disease or chemical contamination. This process is also popularly known as a post mortem, and has both medical and legal ramifications, on occasions being the requisite for the formal issue of a death certificate and release of the body for burial or cremation. B Banditti An Italian word nominally meaning a group of robbers or outlaws but carrying, in First-Wave Gothic, an additional charge of murder and intrigue. The term is normally only applied in a European context, in those Gothic works located typically in the isolated rural hinterlands of France, Spain, Germany and – most frequently – Italy. In Female Gothic novels, the heroine is frequently depicted as being abducted by banditti, her journey across country made the more perilous by sporadic intimations of the likelihood of rape or murder, her safety at times guaranteed only by the group’s fear of some charismatic or noble leader, the latter often identifiable as a Gothic Hero. Gothic banditti are analogous, in some respects, to the characteristic outlaws of the German Räuberroman, though they draw a certain amount of cultural energy also from eighteenth-century fears of political cabals and secret societies across Europe. Banshee Derived from the Irish bean sídhe (‘woman of the hills’ or, in some variants, ‘woman of the fairies’), the banshee is a portentous and rarely seen supernatural being, traditionally supposed to howl around a dwelling or family at a time of imminent death. Basilisk The basilisk or cockatrice is a mythical creature hatched by a serpent from a cock’s egg. It has the reputed power of striking dead those upon whom it fixes its gaze. Bathos A ludicrous descent from the elevated to the commonplace in writing or speech, bathos is often realised in Gothic in the interplay between noble figures and their attendant servants, the latter interfacing comedic ignorance, incongruity of speech or ironic misunderstanding with the conventional dignity of their employers. Beast-Man An example of the ab-human, beast-men and beastwomen embody both human and animal characteristics. In this category may be found those conventional humans apparently raised in ignorance of human culture, for example noble savages such as Immalee in Melmoth the Wanderer (1820) by Charles Robert Maturin (1780–1824). The boundaries between

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beast and human may be ambiguous and tenuous, even where no species hybridity is claimed. The titular character of ‘Wolf Alice’, anthologised in The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories (1979) by Angela Carter (1940–92), is raised by wolves and, failing to adjust to human society, becomes associated with a werewolf – this latter being a very obvious exemplar of literal animal–human hybridity. Such transitions between species may be ostensibly explained in fiction by science – as they are, for example, in the vivisection of The Island of Dr Moreau (1896) by H. G. Wells (1866–1946) – or by religion, as in ‘The Mark of the Beast’ (1890) by Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936). The literary vampire is, likewise, a reflex of the beast-man tradition. It is not merely the vampire’s shape-changing abilities that are relevant here: the association of un-dead physiology and physiognomy at the Victorian fin de siècle with human degeneration anticipates such twentieth-century works as The Shadow over Innsmouth (1936) by H. P. Lovecraft (1890–1937), a New England Gothic narrative populated by human–fish hybrids. Bell, Book and Candle This phrase has been popularly, though incorrectly, deployed to describe rituals of exorcism. Its origins, though, lie not in the casting out of demons but in the formal expelling of heretics, murderers and others judged unforgivably sinful from the Roman Catholic church. In the original ritual, which is no longer in use, a sentence of anathema would be pronounced, in which the subject was formally excluded not merely from the church but also from the society of other Christians, being forbidden in addition any access to the Eucharist; the holy book would then be closed by the presiding bishop and the candle (or candles) snuffed by being dashed to the ground. As a form of curse this ceremony delivered the individual’s soul over to the custody of Satan, albeit with the suggestion that the decree was not irrevocable and might be redeemed either before the excommunicate’s death or else at the Biblical Day of Judgement. Bildungsroman Conventionally, a novel that describes the psychological or spiritual development of an individual from childhood to maturity. The supreme example in Gothic is almost certainly Frankenstein (1818) by Mary Shelley (1797–1851), where the Creature’s evolving self-knowledge provides a model of experiential human development as well as a searching critique of those attitudes within civil society that impact upon the formation

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BLACKWOOD’S EDINBURGH MAGAZINE

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of character. Lost Souls (1992) by Poppy Z. Brite (1967–), an important exemplar of queer Gothic, is likewise inflected by the bildungsroman in its depiction of the evolving consciousness of the central protagonist, as both a homosexual and a vampire. Bishop In the Roman Catholic and Episcopalian Protestant churches, a senior priest or minister who has oversight over other clergy, and who conventionally manages the financial as well as spiritual matters of a diocese or bishopric. Black Magic A branch of magic which is exercised for evil or negative purposes. In Gothic fiction and cinema, this is the most frequently encountered – and clichéd – form of occult practice, frequently being represented through the rites of Satanism. Black Mass A blasphemous inversion of the Latin Roman Catholic ritual sacrament of the Eucharist or Mass, the Black Mass or messe noir has, reputedly, been practised by witches and worshippers of Satan since at least the fifteenth century. There is, however, no singular ritual that can claim the title of the authoritative ritual of the Black Mass, and many of the rituals conventionally cited as authentic may well have been created for propaganda purposes by agents of the very church which they purport to insult. Many of the images associated with the Black Mass in popular culture stem from fictional depictions, such as that in The Devil Rides Out (1934) by Dennis Wheatley (1897–1977): recurrent features include the use of Latin and chant, the wearing of monastic garments, sexual promiscuity, the recitation of the Lord’s Prayer backwards, and the desecration of the consecrated Host – viewed, literally, as the Body of Christ in the Roman Catholic sacrament – by the assembled participants. Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine A popular and influential monthly magazine, published in Edinburgh between 1817 and 1980, Maga (as Blackwood’s was affectionately known) was a major venue for serial and short Gothic fiction and ghost stories across the nineteenth century. Contributors included Walter Scott (1771–1832), James Hogg (1770–1835), William Mudford (1782–1848), Samuel Warren (1807–77) and Oscar Wilde (1854–1900). The tenor of writing in the journal was satirised by Edgar Allan Poe (1809–49) in ‘How to Write a Blackwood’s Article’ (1838). Maga was also a significant reviewer of longer Gothic works, particularly in its earlier years, its reviewers often deliberately courting controversy.

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Blood As Michel Foucault argues in The History of Sexuality: An Introduction (1976, trans. 1978), blood is ‘a reality with a symbolic function’. While being a central component in the economy of a healthy body, blood retains a symbolic value partially derived from its taboo status and partly from a cultural investment which associates it with the mechanisms of power and inheritance. Both the metaphorical (or symbolic) and the literal (or physiological) purity of blood, its qualities of health and illness, its plenitude and depletion, are effectively governed by the same logic. If blood is diluted, it becomes less effective in the literal body and in its metaphorical capacity as an index of virility or health. If it is mixed, it is compromised. If it is drained, it causes a weakening of the body singular as well as the body politic. It is uncanny, for it is familiar and yet strangely fearful in those cases when abjection is engaged following its escape from the containment of individual flesh. It is a reminder of death just as much as it is an emblem of life. Blood Libel A historical accusation which claimed that ghettoised Jews routinely kidnapped and killed Christian children in order to obtain their blood in connection with certain arcane rites practised within their religion. The Blood Libel is a complex example of anti-Semitism, and specifically recalls the slaughter of the non-Jewish first-born during the exile in Egypt (Exodus 11:1–12:14). The rituals of blood then enacted are recalled in the Feast of the Passover, and the taboo against consuming blood which is intimate to Jewish ritual culture is effectively inverted in the suggestion that those commemorating the Exodus from Egypt are effectively parodying the Roman Catholic sacrament of the Eucharist. Incidences of the Blood Libel, and of the repressive measures consequent upon it, can be traced in Europe as far back as the twelfth century, though sporadic accusations of similar murders have been promulgated in Europe, the US and the Middle East even in the present century. Blue Books Blue books, bluebooks or chapbooks were cheap and heavily abridged adaptations of the full-length Gothic novels popular in the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, usually bound in the blue paper covers that gave them their popular name. A lack of formal copyright legislation facilitated the pirating of First-Wave Gothic works by smaller presses, and these derivative adaptations were frequently issued with titles

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BRITISH GOTHIC

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that very much recalled the originals from which their plots and characters had been borrowed. Unlike the full-length works, blue books were on occasions illustrated and their authorship was often styled as anonymous – as, indeed, were many of the works upon which they were based. Typically between thirty-six and seventy-two pages in length, these were works produced on cheap paper and with negligent proof-reading: few originals survive, though there are sufficient examples extant for an overview to be taken of their influence in transmitting Gothic stylistics from its initial affluent readership to more modest consumers in the literate lower middle classes. Blue Flame In folklore and Gothic works, candles and tapers characteristically burn with a blue flame to indicate the approach or presence of a ghost or supernatural entity. Bravos Derived from the Spanish word for ‘ferocious’ or ‘fierce’, the term ‘bravo’ is conventionally deployed in Gothic to denote a villain, mercenary or assassin – particularly in a historical Continental setting, such as those frequently encountered in First-Wave Gothic. Bravos were, conventionally, ruthless and their loyalty to an employer was characteristically determined by pecuniary interest rather than principle. Though easily associated in the reader’s mind with collective bodies such as banditti, bravos were almost as frequently depicted as lone and theatrical figures, jealously guarding their identities beneath a cloak or domino and responding to any perceived insult with the sword and the poniard. British Gothic The origins of the literary Gothic are historically British, the genre being shaped in its earliest days by the intellectual and aesthetic culture of the eighteenth century. Gothic, at its inception, was in part almost certainly a reaction to the philosophies of both Augustanism and the Enlightenment, its exploration of the supernatural and the irrational providing a strong contrast to the ambience of order and restraint espoused, in different ways, by both. Aesthetically, it drew upon the imagery and preoccupations of the Graveyard School of poetry, while the scholarly antiquarianism of the period underwrote the genre’s pervasive interest in history and its early focus on both feudalism and Gothic architecture. The latter, represented by those monumental ecclesiastical buildings frequently found in a ruined state in post-Reformation Britain, was given a new

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relevance through the publication of A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1757) by the Irish philosopher Edmund Burke (1729–97). Gothic architecture, incidentally, was viewed at the time as a distinctively northern European (and, thus, by extension Protestant) tradition – practical, strong and distinct from the more florid forms of the Roman Catholic and Renaissance traditions of southern Europe. The first generically Gothic novel, The Castle of Otranto (1764) by Horace Walpole (1717–97), was prefaced architecturally by its author’s construction of a fantasy castle, Strawberry Hill, near Twickenham. The playfulness and fakery of this latter enterprise are recalled in the novel, which is itself styled as an authentic Italian manuscript, translated for the modern reader by an English gentleman, and presented as an ostensible artefact rather than a fiction. The prefaces with which Walpole framed the first two editions of The Castle of Otranto should be read, as they are important documents in the formation of a canon of Gothic criticism. These prefaces initiate an enduring tradition of prefacing Gothic narratives with seemingly authoritative statements by editors or translators, and the work which they frame likewise advances the first elements of a grammar of content from which many other works in the genre drew their own resources. Walpole’s narrative succinctly, presents the reader with such recurrent generic elements as a feudal or historical backdrop; the tyrannical father who develops into a Gothic Hero; the vulnerable and virtuous heroine; her attendant and valiant hero; the taboo of incest, whether legal or actual; the monitory ghost; and the revelation of a lost secret or misdeed to be atoned for. Walpole’s work formed something of a paradigm for later writers, its imitators drawing on the chivalry of its plot as much as the supernatural elements in the production of often derivative, and for the most part short, tales of historical romance. The First-Wave Gothic initiated by Walpole developed in a variety of ways across the following fifty years. On the one hand, the tradition of short fiction was maintained by the production of those cheap, derivative (and often plagiarised) fictions known as blue books which were as likely to form a portion of the stock of provincial circulating libraries as their more substantial, and

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more artistically original, novelistic counterparts. The authorship of these latter, like those of the blue books, was often anonymous, and this situation masks the substantial number of female authors active in the production of Gothic fictions in the eighteenth century. In many respects, the genre was dominated by a scarcely acknowledged cadre of female authors, and the readership of the Gothic was often female too – witness the satire of Northanger Abbey (1818) by Jane Austen (1775–1817). The work of Ann Radcliffe (1764–1823) has long been viewed as representative by Gothic criticism, in part because it lies at the centre of the theoretical institution of Female Gothic, though its prominence – and the implicit cultural conflict between her writings and those of Matthew G. Lewis (1775–1818) – may well have inadvertently distracted scholarship from many other writers of distinction, anonymous or otherwise, at the eighteenth-century fin de siècle. The effective closure of the first wave of Gothic in 1818, which is conventionally marked in criticism by the publication of Austen’s Northanger Abbey and Frankenstein by Mary Shelley (1797–1851), may be discerned in the temporal plotting of those two works. Where earlier British Gothic relied upon historical and European settings, the nineteenth-century recension of the genre translated its established conventions into events depicted in contemporary or recent times and enacted within a familiar geography. In this period, the castle and the abbey were progressively replaced by the asylum, the prison and the hospital. The arbitrary abuses traditionally enacted by the feudal baron were likewise eclipsed by those that could be committed, under sanction of law, by unaccountable modern professionals – doctors and lawyers, in particular – or by abusive and greedy parents or guardians, these latter being a standard also of First-Wave Gothic. While science and law often became the new secular instruments of oppression for hero and heroine alike, the ascendancy of religion was correspondingly reduced as Gothic moved in to a new relationship with theatrical melodrama and sensation fiction across the first six decades of the nineteenth century. It did not, however, disappear entirely. If traditional sectarianism was given an introspective direction in the Scottish Gothic of James Hogg (1770–1835), the fear of the Inquisition and monasticism survived also in the Irish Gothic of Charles Robert

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Maturin (1780–1824), the ambivalent and fascinated relationship between British Protestant culture and its Roman Catholic Other colouring the genre up to, and indeed beyond, Dracula (1897) by Bram Stoker (1847–1912). Twentieth-century British Gothic might be said to have been initiated not so much with the novel as through short fiction and the ghost story. This latter was, admittedly, a standard of the nineteenth-century genre, though in the first decade of the twentieth century it became firmly associated with that relatively recent systematisation of ghost hunting known as psychical research. Authors such as Algernon Blackwood (1869–1951) and William Hope Hodgson (1877–1918) developed the motif of the psychic doctor, and incorporated into their work, also, elements from the revival of paganism and Wicca in the twentieth century, most notably by introducing Pan to British Gothic in place of the more familiar Satan. Comic Gothic – an established but minor tradition within the genre – was also revitalised by way of a more knowing manipulation of Gothic conventions on the part of British authors as, for example, in Cold Comfort Farm (1932) by Stella Gibbons (1902–89). Later interventions into the stylistics of self-conscious Gothic embodied both intertextuality and metafiction – witness the fictions, for example, of Angela Carter (1940–92), Peter Ackroyd (1949–) and Will Self (1961–). Despite the rise of an influential and expansive twentiethand twenty-first-century American Gothic, British Gothic has preserved its discrete identity in a global publishing market. Writings by British-born and British-domiciled authors have embodied the preoccupations of other national Gothics, developing distinctive interests in urban Gothic, cultural apocalypse and steampunk, for example, not merely through the novel but also through the graphic novel, cinema, television and the new media of video games. The regional Gothic traditions, too, continue to prosper, Scottish Gothic in particular becoming a reference point for the contemporary in criticism, and Welsh Gothic attaining a new and potentially significant space in cultural expression. Brocken Spectre An optical illusion in which the shadow of a spectator is projected as a visual doppelganger, greatly magnified, upon the clouds or mists surrounding an adjoining mountain peak or slope. The Brocken Spectre is featured in The Private

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CAMP

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Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824) by James Hogg (1770–1835), and is also recalled by Thomas de Quincey (1785–1859) in one of the component essays of Suspiria de Profundis (1845). Byronic Hero Closely related in his attributes and demeanour to the Gothic Hero, the Byronic Hero is, strictly speaking, a term applied only to those hero-villain figures created by Lord Byron (1788–1824) himself. They are exceptional figures, often extreme or distorted in their physique, and characteristically burdened by the memory of some unexpiated crime or damning transgression. Some of their rhetorical energy is, arguably, derived from their author’s own outcast status, and it is no surprise to note that incest has been readily asserted in criticism as the taboo which tortures the titular figure of Byron’s Manfred (1817). The trope of the Byronic Hero can be traced distinctively, also, in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812–18), The Giaour (1813) and The Corsair (1814). C Cabbalism Derived in part from an eleventh-century Jewish mystical and metaphysical tradition known as Cabbala, cabbalism became from the medieval period a synonym for arcane and on occasions occult investigation, overlapping somewhat with alchemy. Cabbalists were reputed to be engaged in the search for the Philosopher’s Stone (which, again reputedly, could turn base metals into gold), in the fabrication and decoding of charms and amulets, and in acts of divination through the dead. Cadaver Derived from Latin, the term ‘cadaver’ refers to a corpse or dead body, and is customarily used in the professional languages of medicine and law. Calavera Catrina, La Originally a satirical zinc etching created between 1910 and 1913 by the Mexican artist José Guadalupe Posada (1852–1913), this image of a skeletonised head dressed in a broad floral hat, typical of those worn by Europeanised Latin-American women at the time, has become a popular global signifier of the Día de Muertos. Camp A form of exaggerated mannerism, favouring effeminacy and theatricality, and often deployed historically to indicate latent or active homosexuality. The initial function of camp as a body of clichés originally associated with heterosexist parody has been

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superseded by its twentieth-century reclamation by those whom it originally Othered. Critics working with queer theory have come to interpret camp as a deliberately deployed marker of personal sexual orientation, and as a resistance to the containment of homosexual lifestyles within heterosexual conceptuality. Campus Gothic A twentieth- and twenty-first-century subgenre of Gothic film (and, less frequently, fiction) concerned with acts of violence taking place upon (primarily US) college and university campuses. Closely aligned with the slasher film, campus Gothic productions tend to embody female nudity, graphic violence, serial killers and a residual morality which, in its characteristic cautions against premature or promiscuous sexuality, at times recalls the folkloric origins of the fairy tale. On occasions, works in this tradition may also recall the Female Gothic, the surviving heroine (or final girl) ultimately overcoming the threat which has most probably annihilated or mutilated her compatriots. Canadian Gothic Though a distinctive Canadian incarnation of the genre can arguably be traced back to the Gothic-inflected historical novel Wacousta (1832) by John Richardson (1796–1852) and the anonymous sectarian polemic of The Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk (1836), criticism of Canadian Gothic appears to be primarily concerned with contemporary fiction written from, and set in, Canada. This is a shame, as what might be regarded as the colonial Gothic phase of the genre in Canada may be deployed as an index to changing attitudes across the nineteenth and earlier twentieth centuries. Earlier works, such as Wacousta, recall the European settlement of the Dominion, and the alternating hostility and support afforded by First-Nation peoples. Though such things are the stuff also of earlier American Gothic, their presence in Dominion culture, as suggested by the influential Canadian critic Herman Northrop Frye (1912– 91), can be seen as indicative of a perceived ‘garrison mentality’, this being a sense of both isolation – in small communities, at frontiers, far from European cultural origins – and the need to defend those values that define self and community. The embattled or garrisoned self, Frye suggests, is an introspective self, also – one fearful, perhaps, of losing self-definition, of ‘going native’, of crossing the borderland into the wilderness where all things are both changed and unfamiliar. Perceived threats to an

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CANDLE

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ordered nineteenth-century way of life include not merely the adjoining wilderness but also, to those writers versed in Protestantism at least, the old-world powers of Roman Catholicism, which may be identified with the French-speaking population and the potential fragmentation of a colony readily identifying itself with geographically distant British values in opposition to encroaching American ones. Twentieth- and twenty-first-century incarnations of the Canadian genre appear to be less concerned with urban Gothic – which has come to dominate much contemporary American Gothic – and tend to focus upon the adjoining lands of the wilderness. Simultaneously the fragile natural environment beloved of ecogothic and a threatening and encroaching margin that proclaims the limits of corporate as well as individual power, the wilderness features in both depictions of the contemporary world and projections of impending cultural and environmental apocalypse: Margaret Atwood (1939–), a leading practitioner of the contemporary genre, is a significant contributor to wilderness Gothic in terms of both her fictional output and critical reflection. Canadian Gothic, in its current incarnation, is not a single unitary tradition, however, and there are several distinctive regional Gothic traditions, organised around perceptions of the landscape (Prairie Gothic), broad geographical regions (Southern Ontario Gothic) or cities (Toronto Gothic) – with the small towns and bleak countryside of Southern Ontario Gothic being at times regarded as comparable to US Southern Gothic. As is also the case with Australian Gothic, a discrete application of Gothic stylistics has been developed by indigenous or FirstNation authors – though these latter remain at present relatively unknown outside of Canada, despite sustained critical interest in postcolonial Gothic. Candle In First-Wave Gothic and some later incarnations of the genre, candles conventionally burn blue to indicate the presence of a ghost or other supernatural entity. An unreliable source of illumination, vulnerable to draughts as well as deliberate extinguishing, they are also frequently associated with moments of crisis in Gothic fiction, the removal of their light characteristically plunging the protagonists into confusion as well as literal darkness.

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Candygothic A theoretical term coined by the British critic Fred Botting in a 2001 essay of the same title, and indicative of the perceptibly hybrid and contradictory nature of Gothic in western culture. With its titular conjunction of sweetness and horror, candygothic represents an attempt to negotiate a place for the genre in a culture of excess, where the boundaries and taboos which once regulated consumption no longer provide a check to that desire, which is premised upon exceeding those social and moral prohibitions. Based upon a model of economy as much as upon a convention of immorality, Botting’s 2001 essay clarifies many of the points raised by the opening gesture of his 1996 survey, Gothic. Cannibalism The consumption of one or more members of a species by others of the same species, cannibalism in its human incarnation has both ritual and necessarily nutritive implications. The act is taboo, yet has historically ancient associations which suggest that to consume your defeated enemy is also to imbibe his or her strength. Outside of this, when pursued in modernity and then justified by the necessity of avoiding starvation, cannibalism exposes the fragility of the canons of the law in their application to the personal right to survive. The so-called Custom of the Sea, in which lots were conventionally drawn by shipwrecked sailors to select one of their number who would die in order that his compatriots might survive, was brought to worldwide public attention by the wreck of the English yacht Mignonette in 1884, a somewhat more elaborate version of the Custom being fictionalised under the title of ‘Le dîner des bustes’ by the French author Gaston Leroux (1868–1927) in 1911. Canon Derived from a theological term conventionally used to demarcate those works of scripture considered as divinely inspired and thus unequivocally part of the Judaeo-Christian Bible, the concept of canon has subsequently been applied to those secular works accepted by critics as being representative of a literary genre or tradition. In Gothic criticism, the application of canon has not been without problematic consequences. Though few modern critics would challenge the status of most of the key writers currently viewed as canonical, it must be noted that the presence and prominence of these have been achieved through the eclipsing of other authors. In the earlier criticism of First-Wave Gothic, most notably, the selective nature of canon

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excluded many prolific female authors (some of whom wrote anonymously), whose works where thereby implicitly judged as being insufficiently original to be formally demarcated as canonical. Recent scholarship has contributed much to the revival of such writers, though more needs to be done in order not merely to incorporate the full breadth of gendered contributors to the genre but also to acknowledge the distinctive contributions made by authors identifying themselves with specific sexual preferences, national identities and ethnic groups. Gothic has been described, on occasions, as having an ‘uncanonical canon’ – though the humorous irony of that statement masks the growing respectability of Gothic within academia, as well as the risks to a liberal attitude towards canon that such an institutionalisation implies. In certain respects, the proliferation of effective subgenres – such as queer Gothic or lesbian Gothic – is a compensation for the perceived inadequacies of an overarching canon. Caribbean Gothic The earliest exponents of Caribbean Gothic predate the abolition of slavery in the British colonies in 1807, and were predicated not merely upon the horrors of human bondage but also upon those other concerns of the plantation system – miscegenation and sexual desire, a fluid social order, the power of native religions, and the terror of the humid and fertile landscape – this last being a quite different type of wilderness Gothic from that associated with American Gothic and Canadian Gothic. If ‘The Story of Henrietta’ (1800) by Charlotte Smith (1749–1806) is representative of this early form of colonial Gothic, the rise of a postcolonial Gothic, which is effectively in dialogue with the earlier form as much as it is with broader British stylistics, is most obviously acknowledged in the prominence accorded in Gothic criticism to Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) by Jean Rhys (1890–1979). Though the dominant language of Caribbean Gothic is English, some francophone and Hispanic authors have tackled contemporary issues of religion and postcolonial politics in recent years, two notable examples being the novelists Pierre Clitandre (1954–) from Haiti and Mayra Montero (1952–) from Cuba, whose work in French and Spanish, respectively, has been translated into English. Carnivalesque A theoretical term coined by the theorist Mikhail Bakhtin which draws upon the energy associated with those cultural celebrations in which conventional social orders and

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hierarchies were temporarily relaxed. The carnivalesque is characteristically playful, at times grotesque or violent, associated with low culture and shot through with sexuality and earthy humour. It represents a temporary liberation from the languages of truth, order and official culture and, outside of comic Gothic, may be perceived in some of the short fiction of Edgar Allan Poe (1809–49) and the fairy tale retellings of Angela Carter (1940–92). Carpenter’s Gothic A vernacular style of Gothic Revival architecture, constructed out of wood rather than stone, and produced across the United States and Canada from around the mid-nineteenth century. The style was utilised in the construction of sacred, institutional and domestic buildings. Catalepsy A medical condition, characterised by a seizure or trance, involving physical immobility and the suspension of sensation. Associated on occasions in the nineteenth century with hysteria, catalepsy has also been cited as a cause for premature burial. Catalepsy might also be induced through the use of drugs, as it is in ‘The Room in the Dragon Volant’ (1872) by J. Sheridan Le Fanu (1814–73). Celtic Gothic Broadly speaking, a convenient demarcation within the regional Gothic of the British Isles that embraces Scottish Gothic, Irish Gothic, Welsh Gothic and Cornish Gothic. In many respects a reflex of both colonial Gothic and postcolonial Gothic, Celtic Gothic dwells upon the status of those cultures often confined to the periphery of an artificially homogenised national life. In so doing, it characteristically exposes not merely past abuses but also the unresolved issues which haunt the contemporary, and its processes are as much concerned with exploring the troubled and conflicted history of the marginalised identity as they are with negotiating its voice within the nation state. Because Celtic identity is essentially tribal rather than being dependent upon formal national or regional boundaries, Celtic Gothic has a diasporic as well as domestic potential, and its imagination of a culture that effectively counters a British nation state centred upon England and English norms represents an enduring form of resistance to a government and a publishing industry that have largely based themselves in, and concerned themselves with, London.

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Chapbooks Also known as blue books, these cheap and derivative redactions of longer Gothic novels were significant in disseminating the stylistics of First-Wave Gothic to new readerships beyond the circulating libraries. Charnel House A vault or building used for the storage – and on occasion display – of human bones and, sometimes, desiccated or mummified bodies. The obvious memento mori function of charnel houses is paralleled by the function of such institutions in negotiating the demarcation between the living and the dead, and in rationalising the epistemological boundary that is death through religious and moral introspection. Graveyards in colder climates frequently incorporated a dead house, reminiscent of the charnel house, but intended primarily for the temporary storage of coffined or recently dead bodies when the ground was too frozen to permit a grave to be dug or where a tomb was not yet ready to receive its occupant. Chiaroscuro An Italian term literally meaning ‘light-dark’, sometimes deployed in Gothic criticism in order to signify the sublime potential of obscurity and shadow. Tonal contrasts between deep shade and associated light may take on a symbolic resonance through the use of chiaroscuro, with the ignorance and despair conventionally associated with darkness graphically emphasised by surrounding or penetrating illumination. Associated in painting with artists such as Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571–1610), chiaroscuro is often deployed by writers in descriptions of large interior spaces, for example in the castles, abbeys and chambers of the Inquisition typical of First-Wave Gothic. Chivalry A code of male (and, by implication, of female) behaviour, modelled on the perceived culture of medieval courts and their attendant knights. Though tales of knightly deeds had long been a component of the informal education of European boys, the development of a more regularised schooling system which cultivated manners as well as knowledge led to the deployment of chivalric ideals as paradigms to be aspired to. In nineteenthcentury Britain these were popularised in particular by the writings of Kenelm Henry Digby (1795/6–1880) and the fiction of Thomas Hughes (1822–96), the imagery of knights, squires, dragons and quests becoming a metaphor for the challenges of life and the temptations which might distract a young man from

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CIRCULATING LIBRARIES

his Christian faith and his perceived duty to others. Central to modern chivalry was a pure and reverent attitude to women, a commitment to defending the weak and the less fortunate, and an embracing of the principles of truth and probity in private as well as business life. The conventional code of chivalry profoundly influenced the development of school education in Britain, the British colonies and the US in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Its contribution to secular and Christian youth organisations cannot be ignored, either – through such subtle routes the dissemination of chivalric ideals successfully transcended the established barriers of social class and national identity. Circulating Libraries Because of the relatively high cost of paper, printing and binding, the texts of First-Wave Gothic were distributed to the genre’s nascent British readership primarily through private subscription libraries rather than by individual purchase. The earliest subscription libraries were established in the first half of the eighteenth century in both London and the provinces. The development of a reliable postal service during the 1830s did not immediately affect the latter, though it was ultimately to contribute to the dominance of London as a source of borrowed material and the growth of a limited number of private companies that, because they had the ability to buy unbound novels in bulk, could dictate terms to publishers regarding the length of copy and the nature of acceptable subject matter. The bibliographical scholarship of Franz J. Potter has revealed that subscription libraries were purchasers not merely of full-length Gothic works but also of the more ephemeral blue books, many of which remained actively in circulation decades after their publication. A single subscription, which was usually purchased annually, entitled the subscriber to borrow one volume at a time, though libraries progressively split their larger volumes into three separate bindings – known colloquially as ‘triple deckers’ – to encourage the purchase of additional subscriptions. The establishment of publicly funded libraries in England from 1847 did not immediately undermine the dominance of their private counterparts, as the public libraries were stocked prototypically with didactic and improving materials rather than fiction. The availability of cheaper wood- (rather than rag-)based paper in the later nineteenth century did, however, bring down the price of books,

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enabling the rise of a wider book-buying public. Though such names as Mudie’s Select Library (1840–1937) were synonymous with circulating library culture in the Victorian period, private subscription libraries survived well into the twentieth century, making use of premises within other commercial ventures: W. H. Smith’s (1860–1961) and Boots Booklovers’ Library (1898–1966) were among the final British providers. Claustrophobia The psychological fear of enclosed or severely confined spaces, claustrophobia characteristically manifests itself in Gothic within narratives of persecution and imprisonment, such as Melmoth the Wanderer (1820) by Charles Robert Maturin (1780–1824), or – at perhaps at its most extreme – in fictions of premature burial, most notably in ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ (1839), ‘The Premature Burial’ (1844) and ‘The Cask of Amontillado’ (1846) by Edgar Allan Poe (1809–49) or ‘The Iron Shroud’ (1830) by William Mudford (1782–1848), which was published in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine. Cock Lane Ghost An alleged haunting in London which began in 1762, the so-called Cock Lane Ghost was possibly the first supernatural phenomenon in Britain to be investigated in anything approaching a systematic manner. The knockings and scratchings manifested by the Cock Lane Ghost were interpreted as a form of communication with the dead some ninety years before spiritualism popularised such a notion in the US and Europe, and the communicating entity – whose recorded behaviour at times anticipates the modern poltergeist – was visited and witnessed by clergymen, lawyers, physicians and authors, many of whom engaged in written debate in the contemporary periodical press. A legal case finally concluded that the ghostly knockings had been produced by a child in the house. Colonial Gothic Strictly speaking, a precursor to the postcolonial Gothic of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the colonial Gothic texts produced in the eighteenth, nineteenth and early to mid-twentieth century are often grouped under that commodious critical heading. This admittedly convenient convention, however, may produce a degree of critical foreshortening, given that works produced under colonial rule were often written by the colonists rather than the colonised, their conventions being determined by the literatures of the imperial nation. Colonial Gothic is arguably almost overwhelmingly European in origin,

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and applies European literary and cultural standards to the colonial terrain it frequently fictionalises: good examples include the ghost stories of the Indian Gothic of B. M. Croker (c.1848–1920) and Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936). There is a subtle difference between colonial Gothic and imperial Gothic, given that the latter often exhibits a more active and open engagement with the politics of invasion and possession even to the point of fictionalising reverse colonisation and the end of empire. Comic Gothic In First-Wave Gothic, comedy is frequently deployed as a sporadic relief to the suspense and tension associated with both the supernatural and more human forms of menace. In early fictions comedy is particularly associated with the spontaneity and gaucherie of servants, this being a convention established at the genre’s inception by Horace Walpole (1717–97) in The Castle of Otranto (1764). Foreigners, as well as the working classes, are also frequently deployed for comedic effect in British Gothic; witness the eccentric behaviour of the Italian Professor Pesca in The Woman in White (1860) by Wilkie Collins (1824–89) or the linguistic peculiarities exhibited by Professor Van Helsing in Dracula (1897) by Bram Stoker (1847–1912). As a genre, the Gothic frequently embodies a strikingly ironic and self-reflective edge that expresses itself not merely in the pointed use of cliché and manipulation of reader expectations, but also in a sustained parody of its own conventions. Most noteworthy here are the playful yet incisive contributions made by Jane Austen (1775–1817) and Thomas Love Peacock (1785–1866) in the form of Northanger Abbey (1818) and Nightmare Abbey (1818) respectively, though the unjustly neglected Told After Supper (1891) by Jerome K. Jerome (1859–1927) represents a fine commentary on the content and telling of ghost stories. Commissioner’s Gothic A style of Gothic Revival architecture approved for the construction of Protestant churches in England under the parliamentary Church Building Act of 1818. Confessional An enclosed space in which, as one of the sacraments of the Roman Catholic church, a sinner ritually confesses their sins to a priest, who has the right to pronounce an absolution which duly releases the penitent transgressor from the spiritual consequences of divine wrath. Conventionally, neither the speaker nor the listener can see each other – a grille or curtain separates the two – and neither can be overheard by others in the church

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in which the confessional is physically located. The secrets of the confessional, therefore, are shared only with God, and it is a popular assumption that the officiating priest will not divulge matters confided to him within that ritual space. The place of the confessional in First-Wave Gothic – such as, for example, The Italian (1797) by Ann Radcliffe (1764–1823) – often embodies a contemporary Protestant suspicion of the sacrament, by suggesting that through such a means a murderer may escape secular punishment for his crimes and continue his life with relative liberty within the physical and spiritual protection afforded by the Roman Catholic church. Convent This term is applied both to a religious community and to the building which actually houses that community. Though a convent might house either men or women, in British Gothic usage it is almost invariably applied to a female institution of nuns. Protestant prejudice associates the convent, which was until comparatively recently an exclusively Roman Catholic institution, with false imprisonment, extortion, and sexual exploitation under the authoritarian control of a presiding abbess or mother superior. Cornish Gothic A minor but discrete component of British Gothic, this regional Gothic tradition draws heavily upon the comparative isolation, sparse population and rugged landscapes of Cornwall. The Cornish peninsula has a rich tradition of folklore, embracing phantom and portentous animals, pixies, fairies and ghosts. There is likewise a vibrant mythology connected with eighteenth- and nineteenth-century smugglers, pirates and wreckers (the last being involved in the deliberate beaching of vessels on reefs and rocks in order to salvage their cargo). Though the term ‘Cornish Gothic’ was deployed in 1998 by Avril Horner and Sue Zlosnik in connection with the fiction of Daphne du Maurier (1907–89), the subgenre’s antecedents can be traced back into the nineteenth century and the collecting and publication of Cornish folklore by William Bottrell (1816–81) and Robert Hunt (1807–87), elements of these traditional tales informing the Victorian novels of writers such as Arthur QuillerCouch (1863–1944) and the Edwardian ghost stories of E. F. Benson (1867–1940). Cornwall has frequently been utilised as a backdrop for writings in the tradition of tourist Gothic also, with notable works being produced by Wilkie Collins (1824–89) and L. T. C. Rolt (1910–74).

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Counterfeit From its inception, Gothic fiction has drawn heavily on the tension between counterfeit and genuine articles. The Castle of Otranto (1764) by Horace Walpole (1717–97) was initially presented as an authentic, translated document, and the novel’s plot revolves around a counterfeit claim to feudal lordship. As the critic Jerrold E. Hogle has suggested, however, with reference to the work of the theorist Jean Baudrillard, such counterfeits are essentially the ghosts of counterfeits, such things themselves being regarded from the Renaissance as highly transferable signifiers of rank and power, rooted in the past but applied in the present. Such cultural artefacts as tokens of rank, be they titles, documents or property, are always recollections of a past age rather than the discrete products of the present. One might note the continuance of the theme of counterfeited continuity into the twentieth century, for example in Southern Gothic, where a residual hegemony may none the less be asserted by planter families fallen from power, or where the American South itself appears sporadically as a ghost within a modern nation culturally resistant to the context of slavery so frequently associated with its heyday. Craft, The A term which refers, variously, to the occult practice (individual or collective) of the witch or to the fraternal organisation of Freemasonry. Crime Fiction A discrete genre in popular fiction originating in the nineteenth century, crime fiction frequently draws upon Gothic stylistics in the creation of both suspense and mystery. This heritage is perhaps most evident in the genre’s early adoption of the locked room mystery, a convention drawing implicitly upon the mythology of the ghost (who may walk through walls) and the stylistics of the ghost story. Popular also in sensation fiction, and best exemplified in Gothic-inflected texts such as Uncle Silas and Wylder’s Hand (both 1864) by J. Sheridan Le Fanu (1814–73), the locked room mystery characteristically recounts, and then rationalises, events enacted within a supposedly sealed room, in which the occupant is either found dead or else survives but cannot explain how an intruder might have gained access to the chamber. In most cases, a secret passage or concealed entrance is utilised to disperse the uncanny energy of the mystery. Though so-called golden age crime writing, which was dominated by British authors and nominally spanned the 1920s and 1930s,

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drew little on the Gothic, the hardboiled tradition of American crime fiction (nominally written from the 1920s to the 1930s) and the noir school of cinema production (1940s) were heavily inflected with Gothic preoccupations, the latter being an almost perfect embodiment of theatrical chiaroscuro. Late twentiethand twenty-first-century crime writing draws heavily upon Gothic tropes of violence and deviance and frequently favours graphic depictions of mutilation or death. Crucifix The representation of Jesus Christ at the moment of his death upon the Cross is frequently encountered in eighteenthand nineteenth-century Gothic and enjoys also a residual power in Gothic film. The crucifix is emblematic of Roman Catholic Christianity – many Protestant cultures consider it idolatrous because of the prohibition in Exodus 20:4. In First-Wave Gothic, crucifixes are frequently deployed to underscore the unquestioning devotion to doctrinal orthodoxy exhibited by monasticism, the suggestion being that such images are worshipped in a way that distracts the supplicant from a more profound faith rooted exclusively in the teachings of the Bible. In later works, such as Dracula (1897) by Bram Stoker (1847–1912), the crucifix gains a prophylactic function as a taboo or holy icon capable of warding off the implicitly satanic predation of the vampire. This latter function of the crucifix has been retained in vampire cinema, reassuringly in the Dracula adaptations of Hammer horror but also more challengingly in Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992), directed by Francis Ford Coppola (1939–). Cthulhu Mythos Coined by the American writer August Derleth (1909–71), this term refers to a fictional universe created by his contemporary H. P. Lovecraft (1890–1937). Lovecraft’s 1928 short story ‘The Call of Cthulhu’ initiated a recurrent cosmological theme in the author’s fiction which imbricated a parallel fantasy universe of ancient and inexplicable demiurges with a more familiar environment reminiscent of near-contemporary East Coast America. The uncanny nature of this environment is underscored by the manner in which the historical and prehistorical past intrudes both physically and psychologically into the twentieth-century present, by the perceived degeneration of modern bodies into more primitive or less human form, and by the intrusion of disruptive matter from outer space or from beneath the earth’s surface. The Mythos, which has a perceptible

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ancestry in the writings of the Irish fantasy author Lord Dunsany (1878–1957), is also expressed through Lovecraft’s more cosmic and abstract narratives of sunken cities and distant, exotic landscapes occupied by unknown or forgotten gods who are, variously, puissant, benign, petulant or insane. The Cthulhu Mythos became something of a shared universe through its adoption and extension by other fantasy writers – including Derleth – after Lovecraft’s death: the term ‘Derleth Mythos’ is on occasions deployed in order to distinguish the Lovecraft narratives from their successors. Curse An utterance which is supposed to condemn its recipient to some physical or spiritual doom or damnation. In western culture, curses have a Biblical precedent – witness God’s condemnation of Cain (Genesis 4:11) – though their Gothic presence characteristically links them not to the Deity but to Satan, and also to those peculiarly empowered as witches or practitioners of Satanism. On occasions, a curse may be embodied in a document or significant object, the possession of which has consequences for the individual in whose possession it is found. Linked to the concept of taboo, in that a curse may make its recipient taboo also, the literal curse may be traced in Gothic through such figures as the Wandering Jew and in such works as ‘Casting the Runes’ (1911) by M. R. James (1862–1936), and its enduring presence may be discerned in more recent productions such as the Japanese film Ringu (1998), directed by Hideo Nakata (1961–). CyberGoth CyberGoth is a term derived from computer gaming, and is used to refer to a Goth subculture that imbricates industrial aesthetics with the stylistics of cyberpunk. Artifice is crucial to cyberGoth style, with PVC, wet-look and neon clothing favoured next to dramatic and obviously synthetic hair enhancement. Androgyny of appearance is, likewise, popular within the subculture. Cyberpunk Cyberpunk is, strictly speaking, a subgenre of science fiction, though its aesthetics frequently draw on Gothic preoccupations. The subgenre often depicts alternative histories, where some branch of known technology has been somehow changed to produce an uncanny and hybrid universe that recalls but distorts environments familiar to the reader – in this respect, it is a parallel to the more obviously Gothic steampunk. There is, most notably, a consistent theme of computerisation and mechanisation – though

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the high capitalism that this technology enables has been responsible for an underworld of dispossessed and alienated individuals (nominally human, but often cyborg) that it fails to recognise and is struggling to contain. Despite the utopian promise of new technology, cyberpunk environments often embody a sense of social degeneration which parallels urban Gothic. Generic exemplars include the early fiction of Philip K. Dick (1928–82) and William Gibson (1948–), though the subgenre has flourished subsequently in the graphic novel and video games. Cyborg Coined as early as 1960, this term refers to humans (or, more rarely, animals) whose organic capabilities have been enhanced by the addition of technological supplements. Such hybrids are uncanny, in that they typically combine a familiar organic silhouette with internal modifications whose presence becomes evident only when they are utilised. The cyborg raises questions about the integrity and uniqueness of conventional life forms, and also implicates issues of self-control and will – these latter being possibly vulnerable to suspension by some controlling force external to the cyborg body. Likewise, the cyborg’s presence provokes questions of evolution and degeneration, and of the eclipse of emotional consciousness in the attainment of physical capability or temporal longevity. The cyborg is a recurrent component of science fiction and cyberpunk. D Damnation Theologically a condemnation to eternal punishment in the afterlife, the concept of damnation has both a literal and a metaphorical application in Gothic. In the case of the former, a protagonist may be damned for some fearful transgression such as apostasy, or else become liable to divine wrath through association with Satan or his emissaries. Figuratively, damnation is also associated with a punitive Hell on earth, a state of secular persecution or isolation experienced as a consequence of having knowingly or unknowingly transgressed some secular rule or convention. The Gothic Hero is a consistent recipient of damnation, variously being delivered to the demons of Hell on his final demise; spending his life seeking to exchange his doom with some other desperate individual; or else being outcast from the society of humankind as the consequence of some perceived wrongdoing.

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Danse Macabre A French term meaning, literally, ‘dance of death’, the phrase danse macabre may refer to a historical and allegorical tradition in painting which reflects upon the universality of death. In paintings and woodcuts within this tradition, the personification of Death, often dressed as the King of Terrors, is seen summoning the living from all walks of life, noble and humble, clergy and laity, old and young, male and female, to a processional dance whose final steps lie within an unavoidable grave. Closely aligned to the memento mori, the danse macabre typically juxtaposes the wholesome, clothed bodies of living individuals with partially naked and decomposing corpses as well as skeletons, the latter sometimes adopting the poses of musicians as well as dancing partners. There is much in the danse macabre which prioritises, for a time at least, the unpleasant prospect of physical dissolution over the theological contexts of divine judgement and damnation. Dark Tourism The practice of travelling to places associated with death or suffering, particularly for pleasure rather than purely investigative purposes. Death Death is more than the point at which the signs of life may no longer be discerned upon or within the body. It is an intersection of those secular and spiritual discourses which control and define bodily existence, has implications for the ownership of the body itself, and raises issues as to the current state of any presumed immortal (or spiritual) identity linked with the deceased. The definition of physical death has shifted over the centuries: where once the ability of the heart to circulate blood unaided was regarded as an index of the viability of life, now the notion of brain-death (in which no significant brain activity is detected by appropriate scientific instruments) is increasingly deployed when making decisions with regard to whether clinical life-support should continue or cease. The nominally dead cannot speak for themselves, in other words, and in their separation from the living they explicitly (through a legally documented will) or implicitly (through the act of dying intestate) grant permission for the living (relatives, doctors, lawyers) to deal with their bodies as much as with their property. Death is thus not simply a state of being but rather a boundary between two culturally discrete conceptualities of existence: it is as epistemological as it is physiological.

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It is through the medium of the ghost in Gothic that the dead most frequently communicate matters which, as living beings, they were apparently unable or unwilling to do, rupturing the passivity and physical distance which separates them from the living. The dead, likewise, are taboo and dangerous, being an uncanny representation of a body once familiar and moving but now alien and still and, through psychoanalytical abjection, a reminder of the fragile boundaries between presence and absence, wholesomeness and infection. The vampire – un-dead, and so poised between conventional life and death – is perhaps the most familiar emblem of the transmissibility of fatal disorder between dead and living bodies. Death’s Head The representation of the human skull as the emblem or personification of the King of Death. As part of an enduring memento mori tradition, the death’s head is often depicted on funerary sculptures, sometimes in conjunction with two crossed thigh bones, as a reminder of mortality. The name is also associated with the Death’s-Head Hawkmoth (one of three species of the genus Acherontia), which characteristically exhibits markings vaguely reminiscent of a human skull. Decadence The state of falling back from a perceived earlier condition of excellence, development or renaissance, the term ‘decadence’ is often associated with the Victorian fin de siècle, though it is applicable to other historical periods for which it is possible to assert that culture has entered into a decline. The Victorian fin de siècle was perceived as decadent in both physical and cultural terms. Social exploration had revealed that the physical bodies of the urban working classes in Victorian Britain had been compromised by deficiencies in food, accommodation and lifestyle, their degeneration threatening the viability of an empire heavily dependent upon its army, navy and industrial workforce. Cultural introspection had, likewise, identified a decadence of morals within some sections of the middle and upper classes, and predicated an approaching decline in national leadership upon the aestheticism of a literary, theatrical and artistic movement preoccupied with sexuality coupled with the perceived effeminacy of a manhood that had turned from sport and war to more sedentary occupations. An apparent dependence upon alcohol and drugs seemingly united both edges of this decadent tide, privileged and proletarian, encompassing and threatening

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a supposed majority still committed to traditional values. As a concept, decadence enjoyed sporadic revivals across the twentieth century, being associated variously with the relaxed culture of Weimar Berlin, with settler populations in the New England Gothic of H. P. Lovecraft (1890–1937), across the breadth of Southern Gothic, and with absinthe-drinking youth subcultures at the close of the twentieth century. Degeneration Closely associated with cultural decadence, the term ‘degeneration’ describes both the perceived physical and mental deterioration of the human population, particularly (though not exclusively) at the Victorian fin de siècle. The prevalent late Victorian theories of degeneration can be divided into two broad categories, both of which centred their gaze upon the urban working classes. Drawing on popular pseudosciences such as phrenology and physiognomy, as well as the European ‘scientific criminology’ typified by the Italian physician Cesare Lombroso (1835–1909), the determinist camp viewed degeneration as a phenomenon which might be regulated by controlling the ability of certain groups – such as habitual criminals, sexual deviants and those of impaired intelligence – to reproduce. The theme of heredity here is accompanied by a persistent cultural mythology which claims that certain qualities may be readily identified through the presence of recurrent physiognomical and physical features – such as an aquiline nose, fang-like teeth or simian hands – and this assumption underwrites a further, racist, aspect of degeneration theory. In this context, the uncontrolled release of sexually active immigrants into the domestic population was considered to be as negative as the excessively limited breeding pool that ostensibly perpetuated a less racially mixed, but still degenerate, urban proletariat. In deterministic thought, it was prototypically the ‘weaker’ race, or the more deficient domestic stock, that would inevitably come to undermine and eventually eclipse its superior hoist. Running parallel to this determinism is an equally pervasive theory of reverse evolution popularised by, among others, the British biologist E. Ray Lankester (1847–1929). Under this theory, degeneration was seen as an evolutionary adaptation to new conditions. The physiological and intellectual decline of the proletariat was thus attributed to their relocation to an urban environment distinguished by cramped living conditions, compromised food and

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a chemical-rich atmosphere. The narrowness of the localised urban breeding pool was, again, identified on occasions as a factor in national decline. Though degeneration in both of these theoretical forms is most popularly associated with the British fin de siècle, its implications have arguably shaped later writings published outside of the British Isles. One would note here the New England Gothic of H. P. Lovecraft (1890–1937), which frequently expresses eugenic dis-ease, and those works in the Southern Gothic tradition which detail the collapse of families unable or unwilling to leave their historical milieu. Demon A malevolent spirit or diabolic agent, frequently a minion of a greater power of evil such as Satan. The role of the demon is frequently one of a tempter whose words or actions may draw the ostensibly virtuous into sin, as is the case in The Monk (1796) by Matthew G. Lewis (1775–1818). In European Doom paintings, demons are frequently depicted as torturers of souls condemned to Hell. Demon Lover Derived in part from a European poetic ballad tradition which characteristically depicted the persecution and ruin of a woman by a lover who is also a demon, this recurrent figure is an implicit context for many male figures in Gothic. The demon lover courts and seduces his victim in the guise of a conventional living suitor (though he may actually be a supernatural entity or a vampire) and, in some cases, returns from beyond the grave as the spectre bridegroom to reclaim a woman who has recklessly promised herself to him for eternity. A particularly gruesome example may be found in the poem ‘Alonzo the Brave and Fair Imogine’ (1796) by Matthew G. Lewis (1775–1818), though the characteristics of the demon lover may also be discerned in the post-mortem mesmerism of Svengali in Trilby (1894) by George du Maurier (1834–96). Día de Muertos The Day of the Dead is a three-day Mexican public celebration occurring between 31 October and 2 November. The festival is a fusion of European and Mesoamerican religious beliefs with regard to the spirits of those no longer living. Altars are erected to the dead, gifts (toys for children, alcohol and food for adults) are left for their gratification, and candles are lit in their memory. Though the now heavily commercialised celebration references some of the symbolism of Halloween, it retains an ambience of the carnivalesque through the public parading of

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decorated skeletons and skulls (often in the form of La Calavera Caterina) in poses reminiscent of the danse macabre. Disability In Gothic and Gothic-inflected fiction, the physically disabled frequently attract suspicion and hostility from their ablebodied compatriots, the perceived abnormality of their bodies supposedly indicating a corresponding degeneration of their morals or minds. This, certainly, is part of the ambience of Edward Hyde in Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) by Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–94) – even though Hyde appears to possess no identifiable disability. The discourse of disability is, however, complex, and the disabled might equally be viewed as those whose mental capacities or determination render them superior to those who dismiss them as ‘cripples’ or ‘imperfect’ emblems of human development – one might note here the puissance of the facially scarred hero of Le Fantôme de l’opéra (1910) by Gaston Le Roux (1868–1927). In more recent literary developments, such as cyberpunk and steampunk, disability is closely associated with prosthesis and bodily enhancement, particularly in the development of the cyborg as a human entity that could not ordinarily survive without technological supplementation. In theoretical terms, the disabled are highly susceptible of analysis by queer Gothic interpretation, and responses to disability, mutilation and bodily malformation may also be rationalised critically through abjection and the uncanny. The disabled body, in short, is simultaneously a familiar and yet alien entity, the presence of which may stimulate introspection upon the concepts of wholesomeness and physical integrity, and problematise the nature of the customary boundaries that demarcate self and other within the consciousness of the perceiver. Divination The foretelling of future events, or the discovery of that which is lost or not known, by means of supernatural or magical means. Divination (or conjuring) by the dead involves the temporary resurrection of the soul (or occasionally the body) of an individual either in possession of some now-lost information or able to commune supernaturally with those who possess the required knowledge in either the spirit or corporeal worlds. The practice has a specific Biblical paradigm: in the Old Testament, Saul, the king of Israel, caused the Witch of Endor to summon up the spirit of Samuel the Prophet (1 Samuel 28:7–21), in contravention of the Biblical prohibition on witchcraft (Leviticus

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19:31). The well-documented practice of the Elizabethan mathematician and astrologer John Dee (1527–1609) is likewise influential in those fictional depictions of conversations with the dead not shaped by the séance paradigm of modern spiritualism. Divination has also been associated with such practices as the reading of tea-leaves (tasseography or tasseomancy), scrying and crystal-ball gazing (spheromancy) and the reading of tarot cards (cartomancy). The Bible has been occasionally utilised for divination through the random selection of verses, this process being known as sortes biblicae. Domestic Gothic Arising as a discrete component of the genre in the nineteenth century, domestic Gothic is a mode of writing set in contemporary times and concerned with both with the internal politics of the household and the relationship of that privileged space to greater society. It is a highly gendered form of Gothic, for the domestic environment is conventionally managed by women – as wives, mothers, governesses or housekeepers – though often on the understanding that such authority is not secure and remains a power delegated by proprietary men. Domestic Gothic characteristically magnifies the potential abuses that may occur within the familiar environment of the home to excessive proportions, and in this way might be said to draw also on the themes of imprisonment and disempowerment associated with both the eighteenth-century Female Gothic and nineteenth-century sensation fiction. Domestic Gothic writers fictionalise those issues of power within the family, noting the abuses that might be committed by parents or siblings in the arranging or prevention of marriage or inheritance, and on occasions considering such taboo issues as incest or illegitimacy. Beyond the confines of the home, domestic Gothic may address, variously, inter-familial relationships, financial dependence upon commercial or charitable institutions, and the social status of families shamed or reduced in power. The concerns raised by the domestic Gothic continue to inform contemporary literature, and are frequently discerned in those fictions that concern themselves with the changed and challenged place of the family in modernity. Domino A type of loose cloak, usually with a small mask that conceals only the upper part of the face. A favoured disguise for Venetian and other bravos in fiction, it adds drama in the fragility of the

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concealment it affords, as it can easily be removed by an opponent. The term ‘domino’ is occasionally applied also to the mask when worn without the cloak. Doom A word that has lost much of its specific legal and theological meaning across the past century: to doom is to pass sentence upon or condemn, whereas to be doomed is to be, alternatively, juridically condemned or else destined to some fate. In the theological understanding of the latter meaning, the condition to which one is doomed is, conventionally, incarceration in Hell – this being the allotted punishment, for example, of those who have committed apostasy or blasphemy, the torments of which were often graphically represented in the Doom paintings of medieval Europe. Doppelganger A double or fetch which, though physically resembling the protagonist of a work to an uncanny degree, none the less frequently exhibits a striking contrast in moral behaviour. This German term has been in use in Britain since at least the midnineteenth century, though the concept of double (or multiple) personalities may be traced back to classical antiquity. Doubling may have a didactic function, by paralleling the lives of nominally identical figures who choose, or are fated to follow, diametrically opposed paths of vice and virtue. It may, equally, be a vehicle for social commentary, where it is the perception of others that facilitates the contrasting destinies of the two personalities that make up the doppelganger. In academic criticism, though, the double is frequently a figure of profound psychoanalytical significance, with the divided self being interpreted as expressive of the conflict between the Pleasure and Reality Principles. With the self fractured in this manner, a reunion or rapprochement of the divided components of desire and restraint might well, it could be argued, bring about resolution, containment and psychological integration. It is, however, a commonplace of the literary doppelganger that reintegration is impossible, and that resolution can only occur through the annihilation of one component by the other – as is the case, for example, in ‘William Wilson’ (1839) by Edgar Allan Poe (1809–49), The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) by Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) or Dorian: An Imitation (2002) by Will Self (1961–). Drama Though the violence of First-Wave Gothic, along with other motifs such as incest and inheritance, is arguably prefigured

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in Jacobean tragedy, the emergence of a discrete Gothic tradition in drama may be traced to the eighteenth century. Responsible for the first avowedly Gothic novel, Horace Walpole (1717–97) is likewise distinguished as the author of The Mysterious Mother (1768), an early blank-verse tragedy of incest, mistaken identity, remorse and suicide, first performed as Narbonne Castle in 1821. Whilst accredited authors of the first wave – including Matthew G. Lewis (1775–1818) and Charles Robert Maturin (1780–1824) – wrote Gothic dramas that saw varying degrees of success, the genre on the British stage was dominated by loosely adapted and frequently anonymous versions of successful novels. These were, like the chapbooks which were their literary equivalent, heavily condensed, their plots dominated by dramatisations of the most spectacular events depicted in the works from which they were derived. Though some dramatists emulated the Female Gothic romances of Ann Radcliffe (1764–1823) and her contemporaries, others dwelled on the spectacle that might be provided by the vampire – for example The Vampire (1820) by J. R. Planché (1796–1880). This latter is a telling index of how Continental theatre influenced the British drama in a manner reminiscent of the relationship between English-language Gothic and the German Sturm und Drang tradition: Planché’s play drew in places upon the French drama Le Vampire (1820) by Charles Nodier (1780–1844). As was the case with the authors of fiction, dramatists were not protected by any substantial copyright legislation – though authorial rights were to be asserted later in the century in both generic forms by, notably, Wilkie Collins (1824–89) and Bram Stoker (1847–1912). From mid-century, Collins – who adapted his own serial works for the stage – was a major contributor to melodrama, a Gothic-inflected form of drama that flourished throughout the century and was perpetuated into the early years of cinema. If the supernatural content of Gothic drama was inimical to social concerns often expressed on the twentieth-century stage, its rhetorical energy was at least retained in Gothic film. The Gothic, though, has made a return to the stage in recent years, most prominently through The Woman in Black (1987), adapted by Stephen Mallatratt (1947–2004) from the 1983 novel by Susan Hill (1942–) and filmed in 2012.

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Dream The thoughts, images and emotions experienced during sleep (or, on occasions, during other forms of unconsciousness such as chemically induced anaesthesia or coma) conventionally gain a story-like quality on their being subsequently rationalised by the self or transmitted to others as a narrative. Conventionally viewed by psychoanalysis as an index of unacknowledged or repressed urges or desires, the dream has long formed a component of psychobiographical criticism – both Horace Walpole (1717–97) and Bram Stoker (1847–1912) claimed – possibly ironically – that they had written Gothic novels following vivid dreams. Within Gothic fiction, though, dreams at times embody their pre-Freudian significance as prophetic or revelatory statements, their insubstantial and temporary presence aligning them with the type of portentous communication often attributed to the ghost within the ghost story. Dutch Gothic Though the Gothic novel appears to have had limited impact upon eighteenth-and nineteenth-century culture in the Netherlands, the genre has come to inform Dutch writing in the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries. Drama, as the critic Agnes Andeweg notes, was the main outlet for Gothic authors in nineteenth-century Holland. Though a few domestic ghost stories were published late in the nineteenth century, and some foreignlanguage works (French and German rather than British) translated, the Gothic influence upon pre-twentieth century Dutch fiction appears to have been confined to inflections within other forms of writing. Andeweg suggests, however, that the Gothic entered more fully into Dutch literary culture in the twentieth century, and that its preoccupation has been primarily upon issues of identity and introspection – among these, she notes, are reflexes of colonial Gothic, evaluations of the relative powers of nostalgia and contemporary identity in an age of reconstruction, the shifting place of spirituality in an increasingly secular culture, and – inevitably – the nature of sexuality and sexual identity within a society popularly regarded as liberal and tolerant. E Ecogothic Defined at length by Andrew Smith and William Hughes in the 2013 essay collection of the same name, ecogothic is that branch of cultural criticism which explores the Gothic by way of ecocritical theory. Though the presence of ecocriticism as a

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ECTOPLASM

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critical and theoretical methodology can be dated to the 1970s, it did not engage with the Gothic in any protracted way until the twenty-first century, despite exhibiting from its earliest days an inclination towards Romanticism, a movement which often drew profoundly upon Gothic imagery. The development in particular of an influential Canadian strand of ecocriticism, which emphasised the significance of wilderness environments, has no doubt eased the recent passage of hitherto excluded Gothic texts into the ecocritical canon in recent years. Gothic, it might be suggested, is unusually susceptible of ecocritical analysis, making its historical exclusion from ecocriticism all the more noteworthy. The canonical texts of First-Wave Gothic and Female Gothic are heavily dependent upon sublime landscapes, whilst that theory – which so much influenced Romanticism also – is sufficiently broad to underwrite the artificial environments of later urban Gothic. Landscapes of apocalypse and ecological disaster – whether this be caused by war or the collapse of sustainable agriculture – are likewise heavily Gothic, and these may fruitfully interface with the textuality of alternative histories and science fiction in critical responses to works as various as, for example, The Last Man (1826) by Mary Shelley (1797–1851), The Drowned World (1962) and The Drought (1965) by J. G. Ballard (1930–2009) or The Road (2006) by Cormac McCarthy (1933–). Ecocriticism is also relevant to the portrayal of domestic and wild animals in Gothic, and might equally be applied to texts which consider degeneration, species hybridity and imperial conquest. Ecophobia A term coined by the critic Simon Estok to describe an irrational hatred of the natural world. Though deployed strikingly in Estok’s reading of natural environments in Shakespearean drama, the concept has potential applications in all areas where human agency controls, modifies or even destroys not merely the natural environment but also any object or substance it may produce. The control of vermin, the selective reproduction of species, the shaping of gardens and planting of crops, and even the modification of natural exudations such as body hair might be taken as evidence of an almost hysterical desire to assert an ascendancy over a perceived and threatening wilderness. Ectoplasm A gelatinous and abject substance allegedly exuded from the bodily orifices of mediums during certain types of spiritualistic

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séance, ectoplasm is supposedly a substance capable of making physical the insubstantial spirit bodies of the dead summoned into the presence of living witnesses. Now popularly associated with fake mediumship in the Victorian and Edwardian periods, the substantial ectoplasm sometimes captured in spirit photography is rarely referenced in modern institutional spiritualism. Edwardian Gothic Gothic fiction produced – especially in the United Kingdom – between 1901 and 1910. This period takes its name from King Edward VII (1841–1910), who succeeded Queen Victoria (1819–1901). The ghost story was notably popular with both authors and readers during this period. Egypt Decorative motifs derived from Egyptian architecture, statuary and hieroglyphics became popular across Europe in the wake of the occupation of Egypt between 1798 and 1801 by Napoleon Bonaparte (1769–1821). This cultural appropriation was paralleled by the rise of a substantial European trade in plundered artefacts, and it is this commodification of the ancient east as something to be exhumed, traded and displayed under the controlling and proprietary gaze of the west that underwrites much of the Gothic encounter with Egypt. As the title of the earliest Gothic novel to consider Egyptian themes – The Mummy! (1828) by Jane Webb (1807–58) – suggests, the genre became fixated upon the mummy, a conventional human body rendered uncanny by death, embalming and the hieroglyphic relics of scarcely understood ritual. Despite the enhanced level of international public interest in ancient Egypt following the discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb in 1922, there was no corresponding revival of Egyptianising Gothic. Egypt continued to be no more than a sporadic focus for Gothic writers and cinematic auteurs, with a comparatively small number of written works and (more frequently) films being produced in the United States and Britain between the 1920s and the 1980s. Amongst these, the most frequently encountered in criticism are The Mummy (Universal, 1932) and Blood from the Mummy’s Tomb (Hammer, 1971), this latter being a (very) loose adaptation of The Jewel of Seven Stars (1903) by Bram Stoker (1847–1912). The deployment of Egyptian mythology in the vampire novels of Anne Rice (1941–) from the late 1980s, and the popularity of the cinematic ‘Mummy Trilogy’ (1999–2008), directed by Stephen Sommers

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(1962–), have, however, led to a minor revival in the subgenre’s popularity at the twenty-first-century fin de siècle. Electronic Voice Phenomena (EVP) Just as nineteenth-century psychical researchers advanced purported evidence of a spiritual afterlife by way of spirit photography, so contemporary parapsychology has on occasion deployed aural technology in the search for messages from the dead. Short bursts of sound that resemble single words or partial sentences have been detected on magnetic-tape media left recording in silent conditions from at least the 1950s, and similar phenomena have been purportedly detected when recording the white-noise spaces between radio channels. Often fragmentary and ambivalent, these sound patterns have been claimed to be communications from discarnate personalities, though their presence is seldom associated with the conversational or interrogative modes typical of mediumship, spiritualism or the use of such devices as the Ouija board. Embalming The processes by which human (and on occasions, animal, avian and piscatorial) cadavers are preserved from decay mostly involve the desiccation of tissue and the chemical stabilisation of volatile organic matter. Mummification may occur naturally, when atmospheric conditions desiccate the flesh, consequently reducing its bulk and distorting both its appearance and colour. Chemical methods, such as those characteristically used in the preparation of an Egyptian mummy, utilised preservative oils and salts but also involved the evisceration of the cadaver and an enshrouding in linen in order to retain a recognisable human contour. Modern embalming techniques assume that the body will be displayed before burial or cremation, and so involve the application of cosmetics as well as the replacement of bodily fluids with preservative chemicals such as formaldehyde or Formalin. Enlightenment Derived from the German term Aufklärung, the term ‘Enlightenment’ is applied to the philosophic, scientific and political tenor of a significant portion of European and North American thought across the eighteenth century. In part a reaction to the lingering influence (and, in places, presence) of political feudalism in Europe, Enlightenment thought embraced a broad notion of meritocracy, and thereby celebrated progressive intellectual achievement rather than the cultural stasis implicit in a hegemony based upon unquestioned inheritance

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and nepotism. As an intellectual movement, it was tempered by rationalism and materialism, and rejected superstition and, at times, the miraculous aspects of orthodox religious faith. Its attempts to rationalise, understand and ultimately contain a myriad world of facts and phenomena which had been historically subject to competing epistemologies led, most notably, to taxonomic achievements such as L’Encyclopédie (1751–76) and the Encyclopaedia Britannica (1768–71), as well as the development of systematic professionalism in scientific fields such as medicine and chemistry. Conventionally, Romanticism has been viewed in criticism as the most significant cultural reaction to Enlightenment rationalism – though the literary Gothic, with its supernatural elements and taste for feudal and historical milieux, precedes it by some decades. Esoteric Knowledge or practice that is understood only by a small number of people – for example, adepts in magic or members of secret societies. Eucharist Also known as Holy Communion or the Lord’s Supper, the Eucharist is the Christian ceremony which commemorates the Biblical Last Supper (Luke 22:17–20) and reminds the communicant of the death and promised return of Christ. The Roman Catholic ceremony of the Mass, one of the seven sacraments of that church, differs significantly from the Protestant rite in its literal rather than figurative interpretation of the elements. In the Mass, the bread and wine blessed by the celebrant and consumed by the communicant literally become, for the believer, the body and blood of Christ through a process known as transubstantiation. Historically, Protestant theology has regarded transubstantiation as blasphemous and idolatrous. In British culture, this latter is noted most forcefully in Article 28 of the Church of England, numerically the largest Christian denomination in the United Kingdom since the Reformation. The 39 Articles of Religion – which remain in force – are appended to the church’s authorised liturgy, contained in The Book of Common Prayer (1662). Eugenics The practice of selective breeding and, implicitly, of perceived racial advancement as applied to human development. A consequence of the stock-breeding successes of eighteenthcentury scientific farming, eugenics became a loose and quasiscientific movement in Europe and in parts of the United States

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in the nineteenth century. Drawing some early impetus from the theories of Charles Darwin (1809–82), eugenic thinkers elided evolution with progress, and sought to ‘improve’ the population in the interest of the nation through informal as well as legally sanctioned discouragement of sexual relations between different racial groups, between those of higher and lower intelligence and between those of disparate physical development. Fear of miscegenation and racial decline became a rhetorical tool in Victorian Europe during the fin de siècle period of pogroms and mass immigration from the east, and the language of eugenics was often deployed, most notably, to maintain residual antiSemitism and discourage the cultural integration of immigrants. The zoologist and biologist E. Ray Lankester (1847–1929) was one of the first to transpose the biological concept of degeneration onto human culture, and though the eugenicist writings of later thinkers, such as Major Leonard Darwin (1850–1943), protracted the debate beyond the fin de siècle, none of these theorists anticipated the literally industrial application of eugenic thought as realised in twentieth-century Nazism. Exorcism A religious rite, canonical in some faiths but ad hoc in others, whereby a demon or demons is or are expelled from a human individual. Justified in Christianity by Christ’s own exorcisms (Matthew 4:24, 8:16; Mark 6:7; Luke 4:41) and his explicit extension of that power to his disciples (Matthew 10:1), the rite is conventionally performed by an ordained minister of religion (normally denominated an exorcist), who utilises apotropaics such as prayers, the sign of the Cross, holy water or the crucifix to expel the demon. Mental illness of varying degrees has, historically, been interpreted as demonic possession and exorcists have often been deployed where a doctor would have been more appropriate. F Fairy Tale Originally a branch of the folk tale and usually associated with transmitting moral messages to children, the fairy tale’s tradition of macabre or fatal happenings has aided its incorporation into the generic Gothic. The evil or absent parents of fairy-tale children, the quests and imprisonments endued by the genre’s protagonists, its taste for magic and for a discernible morality all anticipate the recurrent preoccupations of Gothic

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from the eighteenth century to the present. Though The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories (1979) by Angela Carter (1940–92) is perhaps the best-known exponent of the genre today, earlier Gothic works that draw on the fairy-tale mode include Under the Sunset (1881) by Bram Stoker (1847–1912) and some of the short fiction of Oscar Wilde (1854–1900), most notably ‘The Happy Prince’ and ‘The Selfish Giant’ (both 1888). Family Within the Gothic, the family unit is more often than not regarded as a dangerous rather than a nurturing environment. In part, this is because the family is a central component in the cultural transmission of wealth and status, and therefore parents (or parental substitutes) necessarily exercise a degree of guardianship over courtship and marriage that is at times inimical to the personal desires of those who lack the legal, financial or practical prerogatives necessary to exert their own self-determination. As a self-sustaining unit, the family is likewise associated with incest, a taboo whose practice at best leads to guilt and concealment and at worst inspires fatal consequences. Both comic Gothic and domestic Gothic make frequent use of family situations, and of the interplay between servants and family members, with the presence of secrets and misunderstandings within the home being a recurrent focus. Fantastic, The A term defined by the theorist Tzvetan Todorov which refers to stories, or to events within stories, regarding which the reader is left unclear as to whether that which has been depicted is real or imaginary (unreal). The fantastic represents a moment of epistemological hesitation or uncertainty, destabilising the relationship between the reader and the text, as well as between the act of perception and any certainty regarding that which has been perceived. Fantasy A narrative mode, closely related to Gothic (which, in its earliest exemplars, was a form of historical fantasy) and enacted in imaginary or parallel worlds. These may include imaginative recreations of the past – in the form, for example, of chivalric or courtly environments – or mythopoeic envisionings of uncanny territories populated by beings such as elves, fairies, dragons or demiurges. Imaginative visions of the recent past, of a distorted present or a technologically determined future, such as steampunk, cyberpunk and science fiction, are closely related to fantasy.

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Fate The power of unalterably predetermining events, or the future as predetermined by such a power. In secular terms, this merely means that an individual’s fate is effectively fixed by decisions or actions undertaken – or neglected – by the self and/or others. Theologically, though, fate is a matter of divine decision. In the antinomian and predestinarian traditions of Protestantism, most notably, it is assumed that one who has been fated to receive salvation by God will not lose that destiny even though the individual sin or depart from the faith. Female Gothic First proposed in Literary Women (1963) by Ellen Moers, this term greatly enhanced the recognised achievement of female authors working with Gothic stylistics from the eighteenth century onwards. Moers, significantly, revisited the recurrent plotlines of the genre, and argued that these functioned in part to move the fictional heroine to the centre of the reading experience, her episodes of peril often showcasing her resourcefulness and resilience. The Gothic, according to Moers, further debated the issue of childbirth and its associations of pain and mental trauma before and following the act of parturition. Moers’ initial intervention remains essential reading for anyone seeking an understanding of Gothic criticism as much as one of the gendered authorship of the genre. Its implications have been taken up by later critics, most notably Kate Ferguson Ellis, Eugenia DeLamotte and – perhaps most influentially – Anne Williams in Art of Darkness (1995). In this last work, Williams advances a systematic and necessary definition of Male Gothic, and illustrates the two by way of a style of popular fiction loosely termed ‘Gothic’ in the 1960s. In Williams’ revised definition, the Female Gothic is characterised by a limited viewpoint for the narration (where suspense is generated through a singular concentration on the heroine and her activities); it tends to eschew a literal supernatural in favour of one where uncanny or unprecedented events are ultimately explained as the result of human actions; and its conclusion is more likely to come in the form of a happy and restorative ending rather than in bleak tragedy. Williams is somewhat more explicit than Moers regarding the relationship of the Sublime to Female Gothic, and her work is redolent of the theoretical writings of the novelist Ann Radcliffe (1764–1823) concerning horror and terror. The most recent writings on the Female Gothic (and on its place with respect to queer Gothic)

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have tended towards an extension of the field further into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as well as its progressive application to texts by male authors. The debate has been, unusually, conducted for the most part in academic journals, under the editorship of Robert Miles in Women’s Writing (1994) and Andrew Smith and Diana Wallace in Gothic Studies (2004). Fetch The wraith or doppelganger of a living, rather than a dead, person. A fetch, in folklore and in fiction, is characteristically encountered at a moment of crisis – almost always, the moment of death – and at some geographical distance from where its corporeal counterpart is actually located. Its presence is usually remarked upon by a friend or relative – or at least by one who knows the individual – and the date and time of the visitation, when compared, are usually coterminous with the recorded demise of the living body. Feudalism Though now a contentious term in historiography, feudalism has functioned historically as an evocative concept in the rhetoric of British nationalism and sectarian consciousness. Nominally referring to medieval forms of civil governance by hereditary power, the repressive nature of feudal rule – implicit in arbitrary baronial law – was easily transferred in the polemic of English Protestantism to the institutions of Continental Roman Catholicism. Roman Catholics, the argument went, were little better than serfs, their superstition enforcing their subjection to the church’s financially lucrative sacraments, and their fear of arbitrary violence or dispossession likewise inhibiting any inclination to challenge the power of local secular governance. The Protestant Briton, by contrast, ostensibly embraced an Enlightenment freedom of thought and expression, and an individualism associated with a culture of entrepreneurship that benefitted the productive family and the protecting state, rather than the exploitative church and repressive aristocracy. Any cultural development through which Roman Catholic hegemony might insinuate itself within the Protestant consciousness could thus be rhetorically rendered suspect and a threat to self and nation. Fictional Editor Fictional editors are a recurrent device in Gothic fiction, and their presence characteristically adds a veneer of credibility and order to those narratives that imbricate the uncanny with the familiar. To be an editor, fictional or otherwise, is to exercise power over a text. Implicitly, an editor is tasked with

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removing irrelevant data, with checking the veracity of facts, and with the necessary process of making connections between disparate material in its presentation to a reader who must, for want of another guarantor, trust the judgement of that authoritative and organising figure. In Gothic, though, editorship is as much concerned with the unreliability of the narrative as it is with the ostensible authenticity, comprehensiveness and relevance of the material presented to the reader. For, as part of the process of organising and verifying, an editor must necessarily act as a censor too, and any material that is occluded from the original sources is effectively rendered unavailable to the eventual reader. The process of organising, likewise, may empower the authority of the editor at the expense of the edited material, and the editor’s presence in this sense is a reminder to the mindful reader that, by their very nature, edited accounts are rhetorical rather than objective. Fictional editorship is as old as the genre itself, with The Castle of Otranto (1764) by Horace Walpole (1717–97) being presented to its audience as an authentic (or authenticated) historical document by a supposed translator. Later works that make extensive use of the device include The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824) by James Hogg (1770–1835), In a Glass Darkly (1872) by J. Sheridan Le Fanu (1814–73) and Dracula (1897) by Bram Stoker (1847–1912). The persistence of editorship within Gothic owes much to the genre’s ongoing deployment of supposedly authoritative forms of communication and testimony, and fictional editors, in addition to organising and presenting diaries, letters and witness statements, have handled and intimated the significance of telegrams, newspaper cuttings, Dictaphone recordings and even the inscriptions upon tombstones. The authenticity of all these purported artefacts, however, remains questionable: an editor, after all, interposes a mediating self between the evidence and its perceiver, and the reader never directly encounters the ostensibly genuine, only its implications. Film Noir This term from film studies conventionally refers to a period in monochrome cinematography spanning the 1940s and 1950s and heavily influenced by German Expressionist cinema. Associated particularly with plots derived from the hard-boiled tradition of American crime fiction, noir cinematography makes pointed use of chiaroscuro and the silhouette

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against the backdrop of a built environment reminiscent of urban Gothic. Noir has also influenced cinematic science fiction, and has underwritten a serious neo-noir tradition at the twentieth-century fin de siècle as well as a rich vein of generic comedy and parody. Fin de Siècle This French term, which simply denotes the end of a century, has become especially associated with that period of perceived western cultural crisis which extended from the 1880s through to the first decade of the twentieth century. During this period, the fin de siècle was regarded by many cultural commentators as the fin du globe or end of the world, with self-conscious decadence in art and perceived degeneration in the physical and mental characteristics of the population ostensibly signalling the end of the ‘progressive’ nineteenth century. It is worth noting, though, that the eighteenth- and twentieth-century fins des siècles were equally characterised by a perception of imminent cultural change, the politics and aesthetics of the 1790s being dominated by perceptions of the French Revolution and the Reign of Terror, and the 1990s by concerns regarding pandemics, environmental apocalypse and the potential wholesale failure of modern technology on account of the so-called ‘Millennium Bug’. Final Girl In Gothic film – and specifically in the genre of the slasher film – the final girl is the sole female protagonist who survives the events of the plot. Conventionally it is the final girl who conveys the details of that which has occurred, and it is she also who confronts the killer that has disposed of her associates. In many cases that final encounter will bring about the demise of the killer, but potentially leave the heroine with long-term psychological consequences, such as recurrent nightmares or flashbacks. The final girl is, in many respects, a late reflex of the Female Gothic of the eighteenth century. In common with her First-Wave Gothic counterpart, she may well find her personal qualities tested and confirmed by traumatic experience, though it is not invariable in modern Gothic that her persecutor be conventionally mortal. First-Wave Gothic First-Wave (or First-Phase) Gothic is that period in the genre’s history which begins with The Castle of Otranto (1764) by Horace Walpole (1717–97) and ends, nominally, in 1818 – the year which saw the publication of Frankenstein by Mary Shelley (1797–1851) and the posthumous Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen (1775–1817). This is the period of the

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Gothic’s initial development and stylistic stabilisation, as well as the genre’s transmission from a relatively small to a larger readership by way of the circulating libraries. Whilst the critical demarcations of Female Gothic and Male Gothic are both represented in First-Wave stylistics, it should be noted that female authors – often writing anonymously – were major contributors to the genre at this time, both as the authors of extensive and original works and in the derivative formats of blue books and chapbooks. Flagellant Historically, an individual who scourges the self (or is scourged by others) as part of a religious discipline. In British Gothic, which is largely Protestant in tenor, flagellation is overwhelmingly depicted as a Continental and Roman Catholic practice: a rare, and somewhat ironic, exception can be found in the later stages of The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824) by the Scottish Gothic novelist James Hogg (1770–1835). In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the term ‘flagellation’ has become progressively (if not predominantly) associated with the use of flogging within sexualised sadomasochism. Flambeau A flaming torch, usually formed of a bound assembly of sticks coated in wax. Flambeaux appear in historical Gothic novels as a source of illumination more reliable than the much smaller taper or rush light: they may be carried, though they are often depicted in a holder on an internal or external wall. Flâneur Though the original French term denotes merely a casual stroller or aimless wanderer, Gothic instances of flâneurie tend to be associated with obsessive observation and pursuit. In Gothic, the flâneur is characteristically male, middle- or upper-class and wanders nocturnal streets. Though he may stalk a single individual – as does the narrator of ‘The Man of the Crowd’ (1839) by Edgar Allan Poe (1809–49) – the flâneur is more often than not a socially detached observer of a much broader panorama of lives and vices within the poorer quarters of the city. The flâneur is, needless to say, an important component of urban Gothic, and he may – as is the case with the eponymous Gothic hero of The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) by Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) – become an active participant in the vices or violence he observes in the urban underworld. Literary flâneurie is, in many respects, a fictional ancestor to contemporary psychogeography.

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Found Manuscript/Footage Drawing on the fictional – and often unreliable – authority exercised in Gothic by documents such as diaries and letters, ‘found’ materials are frequently deployed to add veracity to an already-experienced course of events or else to move the plot to its next phase. Within a narrative, the ‘lost’ document, when recovered, may confirm an individual’s identity or status, may lead the protagonist to some hitherto missing object or person, or may simply explain and bring closure to some troubling incident. The device may also be deployed in the framing of a work, as is the case of The Manuscript Found in Saragossa (1805) by Jan Potocki (1761–1815) or the allegedly found footage which was released as The Blair Witch Project (1999) following an internet campaign which provided a fauxhistorical background for the film in the form of an urban myth. Freak Show Freak shows enjoy an antiquity of at least 300 years, though their popularity has progressively diminished with the development of newer ways of perceiving disability. Historically, freak shows exhibited both animals and human beings who embodied either unusual physical developments or else spectacular body modifications. Among the visible organic differences favoured by impresarios were persons of unusually tall or short stature, the hirsute (particularly women, in the form of ‘the bearded lady’), transsexuals and hermaphrodites, Siamese twins, and subjects exhibiting visible physical supplementations such as additional limbs. Tattooed women were also frequently exhibited in freak shows, in an era when tattooing was almost exclusively a male practice, and racial differences were fetishised in the display of what were claimed to be ‘wild’ or feral non-Europeans. If such figures were often displayed passively in a room or booth, with the voyeur being charged admission, other aspects of the freak show highlighted displays of unusual or abject behaviour such as eating bones, raw meat, stones and other indigestible material, the performers in such displays (who were often mentally ill and denied anything approaching palliative treatment) being popularly known as geeks. Though freak shows were often travelling events, somewhat in the manner of the circus, permanent displays were not unknown. Freemasonry A fraternal organisation, the rituals and symbolism of which are based upon the practice of medieval stonemasons, Freemasonry was regularly organised in England under a United

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Grand Lodge in 1717, following many years of local organisation. British Freemasonry invests its exclusively male candidates progressively with three degrees (Entered Apprentice, Fellowcraft and Master Mason – this last known colloquially as ‘the third degree’), and has links to other fraternal bodies (or ‘side orders’) such as the Knights Templar and the Rosicrucian Order. Though it is occasionally depicted in Gothic fiction as one of a number of ambivalent secret societies, Freemasonry has historically drawn upon the philosophical and egalitarian tenets of the Enlightenment and has never been an exclusively Christian organisation. French Gothic The opinion of the Marquis de Sade (1740–1814) that the Gothic novel at the eighteenth-century fin de siècle was a cultural consequence of the French Revolution and the Reign of Terror (1793–94) is indicative of the vogue for the works of anglophone authors such as Ann Radcliffe (1764–1823), duly translated, in the nascent republic. That turbulent period in French history produced comparatively few generically Gothic works in the French language, though the posthumous novel La Religeuse (1796) by Denis Diderot (1713–83) doubtless owed much of its contextual popularity to its embodiment of recognisably Gothic preoccupations, from the power of Roman Catholicism broadly to the specific location of the convent. The reconstruction of French society across the nineteenth century brought with it the development of a more sustained and coherent Gothic stylistics, heavily influenced by the frénétique tradition and its successor, the roman noir. Mid-nineteenth-century Gothic was preoccupied with violence and crime: popular works such as Les Mystères de Paris (1842–43) by Eugène Sue (1804–57) parallel the urban Gothic being developed at the same time in Britain. The early twentieth-century writings of Gaston Leroux (1868–1927) are worthy of consideration, not merely for the influence exercised by Le Fantôme de l’opéra (1910) upon popular culture but also for their place in the development of short horror and crime fiction. French Revolution The violent overthrow of the French monarchy in 1789, and the development of the Revolution into the Reign of Terror (1793–94), had a profound effect upon European and American culture. From within France, the Marquis de Sade (1740–1814) opined that the First-Wave Gothic novel of the 1790s was a consequence of the Revolution and its political

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aftershocks. Certainly, the secret tribunals of the Reign of Terror elided easily into British Gothic fantasies regarding the Inquisition, just as the Revolutionary mob was translated via fiction into other fantasies of collective violence. Though the relationship of events in contemporary France to the imaginative histories produced by novelists working at the eighteenth-century fin de siècle is a complex one, it exhibits both a fascination with and a horror of the arbitrary power both of the mob and of the subtler puissance of their controlling demagogues. Frénétique Identified in somewhat negative terms by Charles Nodier (1780–1844) in 1821, this school within French Gothic writing was typified by depictions of violence and extreme peril more reminiscent of the German Schauerroman than the first wave of British Gothic that continued to circulate (in translation) in post-Napoleonic France. Frénétique novels, which tended to favour narratives set in France, in the French colonies or on the sea routes connecting these, influenced the development of the serial novel or roman feuilleton in the 1840s before falling into a seemingly terminal decline in the 1850s. The heritage of the frénétique tradition is thus its influence upon other, related genres. G Georgian Gothic Gothic fiction – particularly British Gothic – produced between 1910 and 1936. The period is named after King George V (1865–1936), who succeeded King Edward VII (1841–1910). German Gothic Like British Gothic, German Gothic has an eighteenthcentury heritage, and a degree of cross-fertilisation between these two parallel national traditions is perceptible. The terminology appropriate to German Gothic is quite distinct from that deployed in other nominally national Gothics, with the overall tradition being subdivided into discrete and nationally specific elements such as Sturm und Drang, the Schauerroman, the Räuberroman and the Ritterroman. Works translated from the German influenced earlier anglophone Gothic, with the works of Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller (1759–1805) being praised by, among others, Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) and Lord Byron (1788–1824), and two authentic titles translated from the German being numbered among the ‘horrid’ novels in Northanger Abbey (1818) by Jane Austen (1775–1817).

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Ghost Usually the apparitional but intangible image of a dead person, as opposed to the corporeal body associated with, for example, the ghoul or zombie. Within Gothic, the spectral appearance of animals and even machines is not unknown, and in most cases is exhibited as an aural as well as visual experience. The ghost of a living person is conventionally termed a fetch. Ghosts have, for the most part, a functional purposefulness in Gothic. They remind the fictional protagonist of some significant past action; provide information regarding matters hitherto unknown to character or reader; exercise admonishment, punishment or forgiveness; guide or restrict movement and actions; and convey warnings of impending disaster. Ghosts populate the founding text of the genre, The Castle of Otranto (1764) by Horace Walpole (1717–97), and have subsequently proved a perennial component of the Gothic, with the ghost story itself developing as a discrete tradition within supernatural fiction during the nineteenth century. Ghost Story Though closely related to the Gothic, the ghost story can be regarded as being discrete within the genre due to its commitment to the supernatural. Where the Gothic is not necessarily defined by the presence of a supernatural entity, its generic conformity being vested in, for example, its use of structural conventions, its attitude to history, or its deployment of aesthetic criteria such as the Sublime, the ghost story is premised upon the anticipation or presence of a ghost or similar apparition, and the scripted consequences that follow such a manifestation. There is, likewise, a fairly consistent convention within the ghost story regarding the featured spectre being a real entity, rather than an illusion or deceit fabricated by human hands, though hoax apparitions are occasionally encountered – for example in the debunking actions of the titular psychic doctor in Carnacki the Ghost Finder (1913) by William Hope Hodgson (1877–1918). The ghost story tends to be conducted at a shorter length than the Gothic novel and seldom exceeds the novella format, and its earliest manifestations may well have been shaped by the editorial condensation of much longer works in the blue book and chapbook traditions of the eighteenth century. The short story format was enthusiastically embraced by the periodical press in the nineteenth century, with journals such as Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine publishing both self-contained ghost stories

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and episodic serial Gothic. The nineteenth century also saw the earliest publication of single-author collections of ghost stories in volume format, as well as the development of a British tradition of telling ghost stories at Christmas, popularised most notably in periodicals edited by Charles Dickens (1812–70). In the twentieth century, the periodical publication of ghost stories was revivified by pulp publications such as Weird Tales, and the tradition of single-author collections has been maintained by writers of longer Gothic such as Stephen King (1947–) and Ramsey Campbell (1946–). Though the ghost story should, strictly speaking, be defined by the presence of the ghost, the term has on occasions been loosely applied to short Gothic works that superficially resemble ghost stories, irrespective of supernatural content. Ghoul In Arabic literature, a ghoul (occasionally spelt ‘ghul’ or ‘goule’) is a demon which haunts graveyards and consumes dead human flesh. Popularised amongst readers of the Gothic in Vathek (1786) by William Beckford (1760–1844) as a pale dweller amongst the graves, the ghoul was further popularised by Lord Byron (1788–1824) in The Giaour (1813), where it is juxtaposed as a supernatural being with the vampire. Later literary manifestations of the ghoul associate it not with the supernatural but with acts of cannibalism conducted by conventional but degenerate mortal bodies, such as the cemetery dwellers of ‘Pickman’s Model’ (in Weird Tales, 1927) by H. P. Lovecraft (1890–1937). Twentieth- and twenty-first-century zombie fictions, which characteristically privilege scientific over supernatural explanations for the revival of corpses, occasionally refer to the walking dead as ghouls even though the relationship is, effectively, inverted as it is the dead which consume living flesh. Giaour Originally a derogatory name for those who are not Muslims or who have seceded from Islam, this term has been historically deployed in Gothic to indicate a monstrous departure from humanity. In Vathek (1786) by William Beckford (1760–1844), the giaour is both physically repulsive and morally dubious, his prime function being to tempt the titular caliph into apostasy. In the long poem The Giaour (1813) by Lord Byron (1788–1824), the titular character is an outcast apostate and doomed, in the

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manner of a vampire, to predate upon his own family as a punishment for his disobedience. Global Gothic A term coined by the critic Glennis Byron in 2013 in order to comprehend the proliferation of national and regional Gothic literatures in an age of globalisation. Whilst acknowledging the role of twentieth-century criticism in defining discrete national Gothics such as Japanese Gothic and regional forms as geographically narrow as San Francisco Gothic, Byron’s vison of global Gothic is careful to understand these as being underwritten in part by their respective place in a developing and increasingly integrated global economy where established national boundaries exist in a palimpsestic relationship to less defined (and often more fluid) technological, political and economic demarcations. Global Gothic study addresses the impact of globalisation on cultural distinctions, and notes the tendency of twentieth- and twenty-first-century global culture to both homogenise culture broadly and specifically commodify its local variations. This relationship, notably, implicates a transnational dynamic which may see older forms of the genre revivified by international contact or new forms emerging from novel cultural, technological or economic developments. Finally, Byron’s vision embraces a consideration as to how the anxieties associated with globalisation may themselves be expressed through the conventions of Gothic. Golden Dawn The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn was a mystical and philosophical fraternity, open to both sexes, founded in London in 1887 or 1888. Its initiatory system, and commitment to experiments in magic and ritual, attracted many Victorian Gothic and Edwardian Gothic authors, including Algernon Blackwood (1869–1951), Aleister Crowley (1875–1947), Dion Fortune (1890–1946) and Arthur Machen (1863–1947). Golem In Jewish occult tradition, a humanoid creation temporarily endowed with life through the exercise of ritual magic, and usually deployed as a physical defence against local anti-Semitism. Fabricated (like the Biblical Adam) from clay but conventionally given power through being inscribed with the secret name of God, which is venerated in cabbalism, the golem may be disarmed by the removal of one or more of the syllables of that appellation.

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Goth Historically, a member of a warlike Germanic tribal group which first began to make incursions into the Roman Empire in 238 ce. The Visigoths sacked the imperial city of Rome in 410 ce, and that campaign initiated a persistent cultural application of the term ‘Goth’ to later individuals or communities perceived as ignorant, destructive or lacking refinement in culture. Goth Subculture An international and contemporary subculture with roots in 1980s England, Goth drew much of its initial energy from the uncertain period that followed the relatively short fashion for punk rock. It is – much more than is the case with the subcultures of the 1960s and 1970s – a comprehensive identity which imbricates music with dress, film, fiction, art, community adhesion and identity. The clichés of Goth – which are a generalisation, and far from adequate as elements of definition – associate those who embrace the style with black or dark clothing (ornamented and augmented with velvet, lace and fishnet), pale makeup, androgyny, and a listless air of depression and introspection. More consistent and homogeneous in its aesthetic stylistics than punk, Goth has none the less subdivided into a myriad of discrete identities which draw not merely upon the darker images of Gothic literature and Gothic film but also, variously, on Japanese anime and Lolita culture, on rockabilly, heavy metal and death rock music, neo-Victorian and steampunk fashions, and some aspects of paganism and faery. Gotham City This early nineteenth-century nickname for New York was applied in 1939 to the fictional north-eastern US city in which the DC Comics super-hero Batman conducted his campaign against criminality. The graphic novel depictions of Gotham draw, at various times, upon the sublime architectural features of New York, New Jersey and Chicago, in particular, and emphasise the chiaroscuro of tall buildings and a labyrinth of streets. As an exercise in crime fiction, the Gotham of Batman is distinguished by implications of civic and police corruption, as well as intimations of mob racketeering that recall the era of Prohibition. Gothic Architecture A structural as well as aesthetic tradition in architecture that developed in Europe from the twelfth century ce, Gothic architecture is distinguished by its innovative use of the pointed arch and the relatively slim column to produce taller and more theatrically illuminated ecclesiastical buildings.

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Though part of the function of Gothic was to enable the display of didactic and allegorical stained glass, the style had further implications in its management of light within the interior ritual space. Logically, light cannot be perceived without shade, and architectural design utilised full illumination, partial shade and deep shadow to enforce an allegorical understanding of the relationship between humanity and the deity. By creating chiaroscuro, Gothic architecture facilitated a sublime sense of awe for those gathered within the body of the church: in Roman Catholic ceremonial, deliberate illumination reminded the communicant of Christ as the Light of the World during the sacrament of the Mass, whilst the contrived shadow surrounding the confessional reminded the penitent of the darkness of unforgiven sin. Gothic architecture reached its zenith in the design and construction of the great cathedrals of Europe, with Notre Dame de Paris, Chartres, York Minster and Canterbury Cathedral being representative of the style. Elements of Gothic architecture informed the sacred and secular buildings of the later Gothic revival. Gothic Body Gothic frequently treats the human body as a disturbingly aesthetic commodity, dwelling on its excess, its capacity for modification, its degeneration and its abjection and fragmentation following violence, decay or death. The Gothic body is, in a sense, always on display, and it is rendered uncanny for the reader because of the very act of display. It is the process of viewing the body, therefore, which is most acute: in a way, the Gothic body partakes of some of the cultural energy associated with the Sublime. Gothic Film The French auteur Georges Méliès (1861–1938) is usually credited with the first two films within the genre, namely Le Manoir du diable (1896) and La Caverne maudite (1898). His Cleopatra (1899) depicted the resurrection of the queen’s mummy. Though an adaptation of Frankenstein (1818) by Mary Shelley (1797–1851) was produced as early as 1910 in the US, early Gothic cinema was notably European in terms of both preferred location and artistic temperament. German auteurs, in particular were pioneers, and the two versions of The Golem (1915, 1920) directed by Paul Wegener (1874–1948), The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (1920) directed by Robert Wiene (1873–1938) and Nosferatu the Vampire (1922) by F. W. Murnau (1888–1931) are touchstone works which arguably defined the genre for the first

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half of the twentieth century. Gothic works produced in Hollywood eclipsed their European counterparts as the 1920s progressed, and Lon Chaney Snr (1883–1930) became arguably the first actor to be defined by his role in silent horror films. His son, Lon Chaney Jnr (1906–73), was an equally influential figure in the field of talking pictures, and his adaptability saw him play the titular werewolf in The Wolf Man (1941) as well as more recognisably human roles. The period following the Second World War, and the fears associated with the Cold War, impacted upon Gothic cinema in the form of a significant number of Hollywood films premised upon impending apocalypse. These included works which contemplated the genetic implications of the nuclear age (Them!, 1954) or the total annihilation of the planet (The Day the Earth Stood Still, 1951). Other films embodied contemporary fears of Soviet infiltration in fables of alien invasion (The Invasion of the Body Snatchers, 1956), in much the same way the FirstWave Gothic novels encoded fears of the French Revolution into narratives of an earlier Roman Catholic Europe. The late 1950s saw the rise of a distinctive UK-based Gothic cinema, often casually referred to as Hammer horror, though in reality embracing the productions of other British companies such as Tyburn and British Lion, in a period that extended into the 1970s. Gothic film continued to flourish across the twentieth-century fin de siècle, though a relaxation of censorship laws in many markets and the rise of computer-generated special effects have facilitated the eclipse of sublime and suggestive obscurity by explicit and abject depictions of violence and bodily disorder. Zombie films, following the lead of the US auteur George A. Romero (1940–2017), have advanced scenes of bloodshed and cannibalism far in excess of those associated with vampire cinema. Though explicit violence remains a characteristic of vampire films, the domestication of the vampire as a social entity rather than a singular and individualistic killer represents a noteworthy development in recent Gothic film, as does the frequent (and often competitive) conjunction of the un-dead with the werewolf. Postmodern Gothic film, like the contemporary Gothic novel, displays a tendency towards metafiction and generic self-referentiality, this latter occasionally leading to instances of comic Gothic. Gothic Hero In Gothic, the conventional hero is a figure quite distinct from the Gothic Hero. The latter is invariably capitalised

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in Gothic criticism, and he is a figure of moral complexity, often accompanied by some distinctive or exceptional physical qualities that distinguish him from more mundane male figures in the Gothic novel. Drawing implicitly upon the Aristotelian theory of tragedy, the Gothic Hero evokes the crucial tragic emotions of pity and fear. He is depicted as a gifted figure whose positive potential has been blighted by some personal transgression or ill fortune associated with his egotistic aspirations. Like the Miltonic Satan, he may have harboured ambitions that challenged the primacy of the Deity, or aspired to steal some Promethean secret the possession of which separates mortal from immortal. On a more mundane level, his crimes might merely be against the good order of a civil or theocratic society. Those crimes might be against property and the individual as well as social body – such as usurpation, murder and parricide – though they may well represent the transgression of some more fundamental and psychological taboo: actual or intended incest is frequently associated with the Gothic Hero. Whatever the case, whether he be expelled from the community of his religion or the instrument of his own apostasy and exclusion, the Gothic Hero is characteristically an isolato, doomed to wander outside of the comfort of human community, and to brood incessantly on his own transgressions, or upon the perceived animosity which others exercise towards him. His wanderings may be further exacerbated by the curse of eternal life and the overwhelming threat of a deferred though still inevitable judgement at the hands of an angry deity: in such instances, the genre draws upon the fate of the Biblical Cain (Genesis 4:11–15) as well as more recent myths of cursed eternal life such as those of the Wandering Jew and Faust. Gothic of the Normal Formulated by the British critic Elaine Hartnell-Mottram in 2007, this is a minor theoretical tradition in Gothic criticism that concentrates upon the personal anxieties associated with being oppressed by those social pressures associated with unexceptional (i.e., ‘normal’) existence. Gothic Novel The classic and most extensive format for the genre, the Gothic novel was initiated through a comparatively short work, The Castle of Otranto (1764) by Horace Walpole (1717–97). Though much of the widely distributed Gothic fiction of the eighteenth century was distributed in the form of short and derivative

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blue books and chapbooks, more substantial works became the norm for original fiction as the century progressed. Many – possibly the majority – of these novels were written by women, their identities frequently disguised through anonymous authorship. For much of the eighteenth century, and for a period extending significantly into the nineteenth century, novels were published across multiple volumes. In part, this convention was a consequence of how the publishing, printing and distribution industries were organised at the time, with works being issued progressively in parts. Later, though, the format was exploited by the circulating libraries, and the three-volume – or ‘triple-decker’ – format became the norm. The single-volume novel eclipsed the triple in the second half of the nineteenth century. Despite both the rise of the ghost story as a discrete tradition related to the genre and the popularity of serial Gothic, the novel continues to flourish as a central component of print-medium Gothic. Gothic Revival Drawing on many of the structural and stylistic components of earlier Gothic architecture, the Gothic revival of the nineteenth century romanticised and politicised the past in order to interrogate and intervene in the present. The style was effectively pioneered by Horace Walpole (1717–97) through his reconstruction of his house at Strawberry Hill into a Gothic fantasy. Walpole deployed what had been a primarily sacred form of architecture for secular – if not frivolous – purposes, using chiaroscuro to create theatrical effect, and in the process implicitly challenging the ‘progressive’ neo-classicism represented in buildings such as St Paul’s cathedral (1675–1710) by Sir Christopher Wren (1632–1723). If Walpole utilised an imaginative vision of Gothic architecture to dispel the unsuperstitious, forward-looking tenets of the Enlightenment, those who adopted the style in the nineteenth century were more inclined to deploy it in the service of contemporary religion and politics through a linking of these with a historical past premised upon the cultural implications of the Reformation. In England, the Church Building Act (1818) effectively established Commissioner’s Gothic as the approved style for Episcopalian churches, and though the style’s Roman Catholic antecedents were later celebrated by architects sympathetic to the revival of the latter church, it became progressively associated with a vision of a Protestant Britain separated culturally and politically as well as sacerdotally from the

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Roman Catholic Continent. The reconstruction of the Houses of Parliament in London in the Gothic style between 1840 and 1847 was a significant statement regarding national identity. Gothic revival architecture declined in popularity in the twentieth century, being eclipsed by the cleaner lines of architectural modernism. Among the few significant later twentieth-century examples of Gothic revival style, the Gothick Villa (1989–91) by Quinlan Terry (1937–) is noteworthy in recalling some of the more delicate features of Strawberry Hill. Grand Guignol Derived from the name of a fin de siècle Parisian theatre which flourished between 1897 and 1962, this term is now applied to the depiction of excessive or graphic violence and abject subject matter in the Gothic. It is a term, perhaps, more frequently encountered in critical responses to Gothic film and the Gothic-inflected graphic novel than in mainstream Gothic criticism. Graphic Novel A highly popular form of textuality within the genre in the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the graphic novel draws upon the energy and stylistics not merely of the historical cartoon but also of Gothic film. Capable of evading the censorship customarily applied to cinematic depictions of violence, sexuality and bodily abjection, the contemporary graphic novel represents a significant extension of the stylistics of the so-called Silver Age (1956–70) of comics in the US. Super-hero fiction, as produced by DC Comics and Marvel, underwent a fin de siècle Hollywood revival through adaptations of earlier serials as diverse as Superman (1978), Batman (1989) and X Men (2000) by various auteurs. These cinematic adaptations in turn revivified the graphic novel format, generating new narratives and spin-off characterisations. Certain characteristic Gothic environments naturally lend themselves to the darker incarnations of the graphic novel, and these include the labyrinth-cities of urban Gothic, the haunted house, the asylum and the prison. The Gothic Hero, likewise, may feature in an incarnation which blurs even further the boundaries between conflicted moralities, particularly where narratives draw on crime fiction. Nominally, the graphic novel is an adult-orientated genre, though its relevance to young adult fiction should not be overlooked. Grave Robbers The removal of a cadaver from its supposedly uninterrupted interment within grave, tomb or charnel house is

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calculated to inspire outrage as well as despair. It is a violation of both the sanctity of death and the proprietary rights of those to whom the sepulture of the dead is entrusted. Though the perpetrator may well be a ghoul, with the corpse removed for cannibalism, the grave robber may also be a so-called resurrection man, disinterring the recently deceased body in order that it be sold to the medical profession as a subject for dissection. Grave robbers have also been associated with the removal of interred possessions such as jewellery from graves, as well as with the harvesting both of bodily organs and tissue for medical experimentation, and of teeth and hair for the cosmetic trade. Graveyard Guardian A ghost, conventionally the first person buried within a cemetery, who defends both the graveyard and its dead occupants against, for example, grave robbers. On occasions, graveyard guardians have been depicted as animals, most frequently spectral but aggressive dogs. Graveyard School A melancholic tradition within eighteenth-century poetry, the Graveyard School did not merely influence First-Wave Gothic but also underwrote much of the ambience of decay and despair later associated with nineteenth-century urban Gothic. Permeated with images of death, decay and occasionally ghosts and other supernatural beings, graveyard poetry is conventionally regarded as being initiated by ‘A Night-Piece on Death’ (1721 or 1722) by Thomas Parnell (1669–1718), being developed further in such works as ‘The Complaint; or, Night-Thoughts on Life, Death and Immortality’ (1742) by Edward Young (1683–1765) and ‘The Grave’ (1743) by Robert Blair (1699–1746), among many others. There is something of the memento mori within graveyard poetry, in that it encourages personal introspection through a contemplation of the icons of death and dissolution. Grimoire Colloquially, a volume of magical incantations and rituals such as might be used by a witch or warlock. Strictly speaking, a grimoire functions more in the manner of a grammar of magic, in that it contains the components that may make up larger rituals which the occult practitioner combines to suit the occasion. Grotesque Architecturally, an eighteenth-century European taste for extravagant and distorted detail, this being a fashion derived from the discovery of small, decorated grottoes beneath Rome in the fifteenth century. Grotesque decoration characteristically blurred

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the boundaries between organic and inorganic substances, between animal and human bodies, and between the sexes, producing an effect which was simultaneously carnivalesque and ridiculous in its monstrosity. As a cultural force, it is as relevant to Romanticism as it is to the Gothic, and in both traditions it draws on the conventionally unstable boundaries between life and death, and between self and other, which structure their generic commitment to the uncanny. Guinea A unit of English (and, later, British) currency, valued at 21 shillings (one pound and one shilling), introduced in 1663 and rendered obsolete by decimalisation in 1971. Professional fees, such as those paid to doctors and solicitors, were conventionally paid in guineas. H Halloween A Christian festival commemorating the dead and celebrated on 30 November each year, All Hallows’ Eve is the night that precedes the Feast of All Saints on 1 November. All Souls’ Day, on which the living prayed for the dead, was celebrated on 2 November. For all its Christian trappings, Halloween is the direct descendant of the pagan festival of Samhain, and as such preserves the folk memory of a time of year when the dead are regarded as being highly mobile and communicative, their ghosts being able to traverse the conventionally opaque veil which separates life from death. The religious content of Halloween has been commercialised and secularised in recent years, and the occasion is often marked by clichéd images of witches, pumpkins, black cats, ghosts and entities derived from Gothic film and the Gothic novel such as the vampire, werewolf and zombie. In Mexico, the Día de Muertos combines both the secular and the sacred, and though commercialised still retains an iconography that resists the US-dominated Halloween industry. Hammer Horror Though this term is often generically used to describe British Gothic film from the late 1950s through to the mid1970s, it should strictly speaking only be applied to those made by Hammer Productions, a film production company founded in 1934. These included eight adaptations of Dracula between 1958 and 1973 and six Frankenstein films between 1957 and 1974, each of these often departing markedly from the settings and plots of the original novels. In its heyday, Hammer covered

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the full range of supernatural entities from the ghost through to zombie, werewolf and vampire narratives, and also produced cinematic science fiction, most notably the contemporary apocalypse of the Quatermass franchise (1955–67). After a period of dormancy, the company was revived in the twenty-first century and continues to produce cinematic horror. Haunted House The classic space in which to encounter the ghost, haunted houses have featured in Gothic from the initiation of the genre with The Castle of Otranto (1764) by Horace Walpole (1717–97). Though First-Wave Gothic possibly favoured the haunted castle or abbey over the domestic Gothic space, the haunted house became more common as writers in both Gothic and the ghost story progressively came to favour works set in a recognisably contemporary period and in geographically familiar space. Much of the puissance of the haunted house revolves around its uncanny status: it is a domestic space rendered strange, and quite possibly one which has been taken out of the possession of its living owners and turned over to the control of supernatural forces. Hauntology Theorised in Specters of Marx (1993) by Jacques Derrida, ‘hauntology’ is a theoretical term occasionally encountered in Gothic criticism. It applies the cultural implications associated with the spectre to the philosophy of history. Just as a ghost is both a presence and an absence, so history is likewise an elusive concept. The present, essentially, exists only in relation to the past, and the contemporary mode of reading that past is fragmented through the modern cultural tendency to perceive the past through its ephemera, rather than through the grand narratives discredited by postmodern historiography. Hell The Christian successor to the classical Hades, Hell is conventionally a place of eternal punishment, presided over by Satan and administered by tormenting demons and fallen angels. Much of the fiery imagery associated with Hell draws perceptibly upon the works of Dante Alighieri (1265–1321) and John Milton (1608–74), as well as the ecclesiastical tradition of Doom paintings which depict the Deity’s judgement and damnation of the wicked after death. The Bible is notably vague when depicting Hell, though it is explicit regarding the role played by fire in eternal punishment (Isaiah 33:14; Mark 9:43).

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Hermeticism A religious, philosophical and esoteric tradition which draws upon Graeco-Egyptian religion and magic, and aspires to a reunion of the human with the divine spirit of the universe. The term is sometimes applied more loosely to speculative secret societies including the Golden Dawn. Hero In the Gothic novel the hero should be regarded as almost the antithesis of the Gothic Hero. The former is the conventional virtuous figure who practises an identifiable form of chivalry and heroism; the latter is an anti-hero, and the focus of much of the plot’s machinations and complexities. Heroine The enduring focus of heterosexual romance in the Gothic tradition, the heroine is characteristically the worthy and fitting counterpart of the hero, and the ostensible victim of the Gothic Hero. She is not necessarily a passive figure. Even in First-Wave Gothic, the Female Gothic tradition scripted heroinism as a status involving self-reliance and personal resourcefulness in the face of natural disaster or human depravity. In this respect, the heroine embodies a capacity to both resist and critique the reductive patriarchal attitude towards women displayed elsewhere within the genre. Holy Water Water that has been consecrated or blessed by a priest or other Christian minister for use in the sacrament of baptism, and for deployment in blessings and spiritual cleansing. In Gothic, holy water is on occasion deployed as an apotropaic, particularly against vampires. ‘Horrid’ Novels The ‘horrid’ novels are seven First-Wave Gothic texts named as such within Northanger Abbey (1818) by Jane Austen (1775–1817). Long regarded as nothing more than emblematic titles with no existence outside of Austen’s comic Gothic novel, their actual existence was independently proved by Montague Summers (1880–1948) and Michael Sadleir (1888–1957). Derived from both British Gothic and German Gothic, the ‘horrid novels’ are: The Castle of Wolfenbach (1793) and The Mysterious Warning (1796), both by Eliza Parsons (1739–1811); The Necromancer (1794) by Ludwig Flammenberg (1765–1813); The Midnight Bell (1798) by Francis Lathom (1774–1832); The Orphan of the Rhine (1798) by Eleanor Sleath (c.1763–?); Clermont (1798) by Regina Maria Roche (1764–1845); and Horrid Mysteries (1796) by the Marquis de Grosse (1768–1847).

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Horror In the posthumously published theoretical work ‘On the Supernatural in Poetry’ (1826) by Ann Radcliffe (1764–1823), horror is delineated as the opposite of terror. Terror, by subtlety and suggestion, partakes of the noblest intimations of the Sublime, and elevates perception and the aesthetic appreciation of extreme situations. Horror, by contrast, numbs aesthetic and sensory appreciation by presenting itself all too explicitly or graphically. Horror is prescriptive, and leaves very little – if anything – to the imagination, where terror is suggestive and stimulates the perceiving mind to enhance the limited data presented. In modern Gothic criticism, horror is frequently regarded as characteristic of Male Gothic, terror of the Female Gothic. Hybridity A state of transition or hesitation between two qualities that generates a disorientating sense of unease and the uncanny. The hybrid is often bound up with abjection, and can be observed where the accepted and conventional boundaries of the body become closely associated with hitherto discrete species or substances (as in the ab-human) or with non-organic or mechanical supplements (as in the cyborg). The process of transitioning between genders may similarly be understood through hybridity. Hypnotism A state of altered consciousness, reminiscent of mesmerism but lacking the fluid logic of that pseudoscience, hypnotism has become associated in fiction with the usually malicious exercise of control by one person over another. Though deployed on occasions as an anaesthetic, diagnostic or therapeutic tool in British medicine from the 1830s, the reputation of hypnotism was hindered by clinical scepticism, claims of sexual exploitation under trance, and the enduring presence of stage hypnotists and drawing-room practitioners. Various methods were utilised in order to place the patient in the trance state: these included the repetitive waving of hands or objects (‘passes’); having the subject gaze into a bright light or fix their eyes upon a static object; or the use of certain significant sounds or words. In the trance state, it was suggested, clairvoyance and clairaudience might be possible, as might control of a sympathetic body separated by distance. Though mainstream medicine dismissed these claims, the technique and implications of hypnotism formed a minor context of fin de siècle Gothic, with Trilby (1894) by George du Maurier (1834–96) and Dracula (1897) by Bram Stoker (1847–1912) providing two of the most explicit depictions of contemporary practice.

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Hysteria The term ‘hysteria’ has long been used out of context, and even in its nineteenth-century heyday as an explanation for individual as well as social disorder there was a liberal interpretation of its symptoms and long-term prognosis. Technically, hysteria ought only to be suffered by women, as it is associated with the womb and the supposed tendency of that organ to move freely around the body. On rising up the abdomen the wandering womb might, for example, cause the sufferer to exhibit the symptoms of choking: these could be dispelled by the administration of such odours as would drive the offending organ back to its accustomed place. Likewise, its descent into the groin might cause congestion and, on occasions, more distressing and immodest symptoms resembling sexual arousal. Again, a suitable substance might need to be placed near the genitalia to relieve the situation. The climax of a hysterical attack was almost invariably a faint or syncope, usually preceded by panic and a loss of self-control. The pseudosciences associated with hysteria gradually gave way to a nascent psychology, albeit one which suggested that primary hysteria (usually symptomatised as an attack of fainting brought about by an actual shock) might be succeeded by a secondary hysteria (a seizure where a similar shock is perceived but, in reality, is not present) and then by tertiary hysteria, where the subject counterfeits a seizure in order to secure (implicitly male) attention. The institutional and cultural sexism which made hysteria the evocative female disorder of the nineteenth century asserted itself further when, towards the fin de siècle, male hysteria was studied as a parallel disorder; it was suggested that effeminate men and office clerks were more likely to fall victim than their more hearty and physical compatriots. I Ignis Fatuus The Latin name for the will-o’-the-wisp or friar’s lantern, an incandescent light seen over marshy ground and, on occasions, in graveyards. Caused by the combustion of naturally decomposing organic matter, ignes fatui have been in the past assumed to be the visible shape of ghosts hovering over the graves of the recently interred. Illuminati A name associated from the eighteenth century with several different secret societies, both historical and fictional, and usually deployed as a synonym for any organisation that exercises

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government above the elected or officially recognised regime. Though nominally connected with the Enlightenment, the illuminati were fictionalised in the German Gothic of Der Geisterseher (1787–89) by Friedrich Schiller (1759–1805) as a body of fraudsters engaged in political intrigue, though the author was careful to parallel their activities with those of the Inquisition. Modern conspiracy theories have revived the place of the illuminati in the shadow governance of secular and sacred institutions, and recent fictional incarnations of the group include Il Pendolo di Foucault (1988) by Umberto Eco (1932–2016) and Angels and Demons (2000) by Dan Brown (1964–). Imperial Gothic Imperial Gothic balances the familiar domestic space from whence the imperial force customarily emanates with the alien environment which the colonising power seeks to conquer, reshape and exploit. It is an exercise in the uncanny, therefore, and implicitly tests the ability of imperial force to subdue, resist and not be defined by the alien culture or landscape upon which it imposes its control. Imperial Gothic has two interdependent focal spaces. These are the domestic Gothic space, into which the spoils of empire – in the form of objects and subject peoples – disruptively intrude. An object pillaged from another culture, a sacred artefact rendered secular by conquest and trade, an individual removed without thought or consent from his or her original environment, may all become focuses for supernatural or else retributive actions, as the subaltern empire comes home to haunt the hegemonic space of the imperialist. Frequently encountered in imperial Gothic is the figure of one who, having gone out to the colonies, has ‘gone native’ and returned profoundly changed by the encounter with an alien culture or religion. This figure may be, like the Gothic Hero, the melancholic and introspective repository of some great secret or regret, or alternately may express through the synecdochic imperial body the anger and frustration of colonised peoples or environments. The second characteristic space of imperial Gothic is to be found within the colonised territory, and tends to interrogate the relative balance of power between the two parties, hegemonic and subaltern, upon the implicitly disputed territory. It is in such places as India, Egypt, Africa and the Orient that the conflict between domestic magic and imperial, secular technology is most acutely played out, and where the power of the former is often seen to

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have an unacknowledged puissance. Those who encounter such things are, almost without exception, radically changed by the experience – a phenomenon which is at its most acute, arguably, in Indian Gothic. The two functional components of imperial Gothic are effectively bridged by a tradition which the critic Stephen D. Arata terms ‘reverse colonisation’, where the home nation is itself imperceptibly invaded, often by a singular occult entity such as a vampire or mummy whose unprecedented powers may disrupt both personal and national life. Though Gothic criticism has particularly stressed the importance of imperial Gothic to British Gothic, most notably at the Victorian fin de siècle, its implications transcend the boundaries of temporality and nationhood. The implications of imperial Gothic, it should be noted, are relevant to American Gothic in terms of both the depiction of settler encounters with Native Americans and the depiction of slavery, and inform also the cultural degeneration depicted in recent as well as twentieth-century Southern Gothic. Indeed, the subgenre is as relevant to the political fantasy of Nazi Gothic as to the practical cultural realities of postcolonial Gothic. Incest Incest is the sexual and reproductive intimacy of biologically close relations such as parents and their children, or siblings with each other. It is taboo in both the religious and cultural senses of that term, with prohibitions being imposed through both sacred and secular law in order to prohibit, or at least deter, the initiation of incestuous relationships. The actuality or threat of incest persists across the breadth of Gothic writing. In FirstWave Gothic, the ecclesiastical prohibition of a quasi-incestuous relationship between a father-in-law and daughter-in-law who are not blood relatives motivates The Castle of Otranto (1764) by Horace Walpole (1717–97), and later authors, such as Ann Radcliffe (1764–1823) and Matthew G. Lewis (1775–1818), utilised the motif of unknown consanguinity in their eighteenthcentury fin de siècle fictions. Biologically, reproduction as a consequence of incest may lead to a perceived degeneration in mental or physical capacity, and this latter may form a context of ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ (1839) by Edgar Allan Poe (1809–49). An incestuous child, it should be noted, has implications for the relative balance of power within the family group, and these have been explored particularly in the vampire fictions of Poppy Z. Brite (1967–), most notably Lost Souls (1992).

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Incubus The male counterpart of a succubus, the incubus is a male demon who has sexual relations with women, and on occasion impregnates them. This is regarded in some Christian traditions as a variety of possession; the incubus may be expelled by exorcism. Indian Gothic The Indian aspect of imperial Gothic is overwhelmingly British in temper, and is preoccupied with the uncertain place of the colonist in the colonial environment. India is a truly uncanny place in this context. India has an unfamiliar geography, multiple languages and religions, and a native population who, in the nineteenth century, entertained a highly mobile attitude to the presence of the British administration. Simultaneously, though, this indigenous psychogeography is overlaid with a highly efficient infrastructure of communications, administration and military power, all modelled on British standards, and a cultural network centred upon clubs, sport, social occasions and lightly modified European ceremonial. Indian Gothic thus negotiates between these competing forces which seek to define, control and express India, charting the relationships not merely between colonised and coloniser but also within the colonist community itself. Inevitably, the work of Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936) is most frequently referenced in Gothic criticism, though the Indian ghost story was developed by many other writers across the nineteenth century. In 1947, British India was partitioned along religious lines into the independent states of East and West Pakistan and the Republic of India. An Indian postcolonial Gothic consciousness is discernible in the work of modern authors as diverse as Salman Rushdie (1947–), Arundhati Roy (1961–) and Lakshmi Raj Sharma (1954–). Inhuman, The A term derived from the writings of the philosopher Jean-François Lyotard, and implicated within the debate regarding the whole concept of being human, if this is a quality partly learned rather than being innate to the species. The relative nature of human and inhuman conceptuality is, for Lyotard, closely bound up with how science and technology may alter and ultimately render unfamiliar the defining ‘human’ functions of mind and body. The inhuman state is also concerned with the repression of certain forces by the idea of the human, and the disruptive nature of their return from repression. Such concerns are, of course, central to postmodern science fiction and its derivatives in steampunk and cyberpunk, where the hybridity of existence challenges the notion of any homogenised definition of the human.

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Inquisition, The The Inquisitions of the Roman Catholic church – official bodies charged with maintaining the orthodoxy of faith, ensuring that converts conform to canonical doctrine and repressing the activities of heretics – were established as early as the twelfth century. Their actions, which often institutionalised the use of torture and executions in conjunction with arbitrary and anonymous ecclesiastical courts, were regarded by Protestants as an index of the Roman church’s attitude to dissent and apostasy. Inquisitions were organised discretely in countries under Roman Catholic governance, the Spanish Inquisition – whose priests and inquisitors accompanied the invading force of the Spanish Armada to England in 1588 – being the most evocative to British Protestantism. Within First-Wave Gothic, the Inquisition functioned as a reminder of the feudal and absolutist nature of the Roman Catholic church and as a displaced representation of the equally arbitrary political culture of the French Revolution. The popularity of the Inquisition as a plot device declined in the nineteenth century, with ‘The Pit and the Pendulum’ (1843) by Edgar Allan Poe (1809–49) being one of the last canonical Gothic works to recall both the institution and its reputation for psychological as well as physical torture. Irish Gothic Ireland has produced some of the most significant texts and authors within Gothic, and the island’s unique cultural and political position facilitates its presence within a number of the central debates concerning the genre. Historically, Ireland has enjoyed an uneasy and ambivalent relationship with the land mass to its immediate east, and in consequence Irish writing is susceptible of interpretations within Gothic criticism premised upon the assumptions of both colonial Gothic and postcolonial Gothic. The sectarian nature of Irish national identity is, likewise, complex. The formal world of letters within Ireland has been, until comparatively recently, governed by an educational paradigm based upon the standards of the English public school and university systems. In Ireland, these historically mobilised and enabled an essentially Protestant school of writing which, none the less at times exhibited a fascination – as the critics Terry Eagleton and Roy Foster argue – with the ostensibly superstitious beliefs of the Roman Catholic majority. Gothic, in this respect, is a vehicle by which the complexities of cultural, political and religious life may be interrogated and

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at times exorcised by authors who are conscious not merely of their own position within a markedly divided society but also of the peculiar – and liminal – place that Ireland occupies in broader British national identities. Irish writing in the genre can be traced to First-Wave Gothic, with Regina Maria Roche (1764–1845) being the author of one of the ‘horrid’ Novels and a contributor to Female Gothic form. Male authors, though, predominate in the nineteenth century, and it is a measure of the relative smallness of Ireland’s Protestant community that the canonical names of the genre – Charles Robert Maturin (1780–1824), J. Sheridan Le Fanu (1814–73), Bram Stoker (1847–1912) and Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) – were all educated at Trinity College, Dublin. The Irish peer and fantasy writer Lord Dunsany (1878–1957) was educated in England. If male Protestants dominated the Irish Gothic of the nineteenth century, the twentieth was to be more inclusive with regard to gender and sectarian identity. Elizabeth Bowen (1899–1973), a Protestant Irishwoman resident in England, developed Gothic motifs across her writing, most notably in The Demon Lover (1945). The writings of John Banville (1945–), a Roman Catholic author, are if anything even more prolific in their Gothic allusions. Other contemporary Irish authors whose works are influenced by the genre include Patrick McCabe (1955–) and Seamus Deane (1940–). Isolato An Italian term which may be applied to the Gothic Hero and some of the introspective wanderers of Romanticism. Such figures are rendered conspicuous by their isolation from humanity, their abiding and incurable sense of grief or regret aligning them with the tradition of Aristotelian tragedy. J Jacobean Tragedy The preoccupations of Jacobean tragedy, though ostensibly unconnected with the genre, might be regarded as an exercise in proto-Gothic stylistics. Jacobean dramatists lingered long upon acts of violence and instances of spectacular sudden death, explored culturally and religiously taboo activities such as incest, and entertained their audiences with scenes set in the lunatic asylum, in the prison or – at the very gates of death – within the charnel house itself. If these elements were not enough to suggest the genre as a precursor to the Gothic – and

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several of the First-Wave Gothic authors, including Horace Walpole (1717–97), had an interest in Gothic drama – then the deployment of Continental (and especially of Italian) settings for plays within the tradition certainly suggests a line of parallel development and possible influence that is worthy of further study. The Jacobean period is conventionally regarded as spanning the years between 1603 and 1625, though its characteristic preoccupations can be discerned both before and after this arbitrary temporal span. Japanese Gothic Japanese Gothic has, essentially, a dual identity, comprising both a significant and distinctive body of traditional folklore loosely resembling western Gothic and a more recent corpus of popular horror which draws, at times, upon the graphic novel and the Gothicised anime film. The traditional Japanese tale is heavily populated with supernatural figures such as demons and ghosts, and its short tales frequently depict the vengeful and returning dead. The resemblance of these to the ghost story may quite possibly be a consequence of the translation of many such works from Japanese into English by the Irish-Greek author Lafcadio Hearn (1850–1904) at the nineteenth-century fin de siècle. Contemporary Japanese Gothic is highly visual in its nature, and is a culture of street fashion as much as a generic style in music, literature and art. A significant portion of its energy is drawn from Goth subculture, with significant elements of technologyfetishised cyberpunk, steampunk and neo-Victorian stylistics, all of these western styles being given a distinctively Japanese inflection. The contemporary Japanese Gothic film industry – often referred to as J-horror – is culturally significant but little understood outside of Japan: of the many productions released internationally to date only Ringu (1998), itself derivative of both a 1991 novel and an earlier folk tale, has achieved prominent and lasting status in the occident. K Ka In ancient Egyptian mythology, the soul or ‘double’ of an individual – though not necessarily the doppelganger in the accepted Gothic deployment of that term. Endowed with the characteristic attributes of an individual, it none the less possessed an absolutely independent existence and was at liberty to move across the earth at will and, on occasions, to converse with the gods.

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Kali A Hindu goddess, usually depicted naked, and with multiple arms, black skin, eyes red with intoxication and a protruding tongue. Though the figure of Kali has multiple and complicated meanings in Indian mythology and sacred culture, her garland of human skulls (and the skirt of severed human arms which she is occasionally depicted as wearing in partial concealment of her nakedness) has forged a popular association, in the west, between the goddess and death. Kelpie In Scottish and Irish mythology, a water spirit, sometimes seen in the form of a horse and enjoying the reputation for leading unwary travellers to death by drowning. Kirk, The The national Protestant church of Scotland, which is Presbyterian rather than Episcopalian. Heavily influenced by the Reformation, it recognises only two sacraments, Baptism and the Eucharist. The term ‘kirk’, without the capital letter, is used in Scots English to refer to the church building itself. L Labyrinth A frequently encountered motif in the genre from FirstWave Gothic to its postmodern equivalent, the labyrinth condenses and expresses fears of containment, disorientation and vulnerability. It may be found in the form of a closed environment from which escape is apparently impossible or alternatively as a sort of quest or test whose completion – in the manner of the Ovidian legend of the Minotaur – may imply personal annihilation. Subterranean environments such as castle cellars and dungeons assimilate easily to the implications of labyrinthine entrapment, as do the enclosed and imprisoning environments of the asylum and Inquisition. The uncanny cities of urban Gothic, steampunk, science fiction and cyberpunk function in a similar fashion, the chiaroscuro of these being frequently exploited in Gothic film. Lamia In classical Greek and Roman legend, a female demon who devoured children. The term has also been applied historically to practitioners of magic, and female witches have been referred to collectively as lamiae. Lantern, Dark A portable lantern fitted with a movable shutter that can hide its light without extinguishing the flame. Lantern, Friar’s An archaic term for the ignis fatuus, sometimes spelt friar’s lanthorn, observed at night, particularly over marshy

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ground. The allusion is, ironically, to a light being held in front of a traveller in order to guide them safely to their destination. Lantern Jaw Long jaws with cheeks so thin and hollow that it is almost possible to see daylight through them. The image compares human skin to the thin plates of animal horn originally employed in place of glass in the lantern’s luminous portion. Laudanum A medically prepared tincture of opium, laudanum was used extensively in the nineteenth century both as an analgesic and as an aid to obtaining deep sleep. The standard preparation of 10 per cent opium to 90 per cent alcohol was intended to be taken in a tumbler of water, though it was often consumed in undiluted form. Though highly addictive, it was available with few restrictions from British pharmacists in the form of branded preparations such as ‘Black Drop’ until 1868. Law Central to the regulation and order of civil society, law is a far from singular institution. Jurisdiction over, and restriction of, human activity may be vested in a number of coexisting and overlapping authorities including civil bodies such as central or local government, religious organisations such as the church, para-church bodies such as the Inquisition and monasticism, and powerful quasi-legal oligarchies such as guilds. First-Wave Gothic stresses in particular the arbitrary power of feudalism, and through this interrogates the ethics of popular governance during the French Revolution and Reign of Terror. The unfavourable position of women under the law is, likewise, a preoccupation of the genre from eighteenth-century Female Gothic through to nineteenth-century sensation fiction. Roman Catholicism, within Protestant-inflected Gothic, is frequently portrayed as acting outside of (and sometimes in opposition to) civil law, most notably in the suppression of apostasy and heresy. Within that church’s own enclosed institutions – the abbey, the convent and the monastery – the rule exercised by the presiding abbess or abbot is conventionally regarded in Gothic as absolute and, frequently, as tyrannical and vindictive also. Lesbian Gothic This term may refer to narratives which describe lesbian activity in Gothic terms – such as ‘Carmilla’ (1871–2) by J. Sheridan Le Fanu (1814–73) – and those texts which are systematically produced in order to express and interrogate the psychology or physicality of female same-sex relationships. As Paulina Palmer – one of the most influential theorists of queer

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Gothic – notes, the Gothic is an ideal vehicle for such a function, as its historic cultural marginality and acknowledged eccentricities of form are easily adapted to mobilise a disruptive subject which likewise exists in a marginal relationship to mainstream heterosexist society. Gothic produced within and through a lesbian consciousness has favoured, most notably, the genres of fantasy and science fiction and has made used of both the ghost and the vampire to portray, among other things, familiar physiologies rendered uncanny, predatory or victimising relationships (in which either the vampire or the vampire hunter may be the aggressor), and the establishment of idealised and sympathetic communities outside of patriarchy and heterosexuality. Lilith Derived from Semitic and Babylonian legend, a succubus-like night demon and vampire who is supposed to be the first wife of the Biblical Adam. In the Vulgate Bible, her name is translated as Lamia. Lunacy A term frequently regarded as synonymous with the more clinical label of insanity, lunacy was originally deployed as a description of intermittent mental instability apparently synchronised with the phases of the moon. The moon’s ostensible 28-day cycle facilitated the association of female lunacy with menstruation, institutionalising those canons of Biblical law which disqualified menstruating women from a full participation in culture and society. Hysteria is, similarly, associated with a temporary loss of control, especially in women. Madness, it should be noted, is a condition that has both legal and medical implications, and its governance is in consequence a matter shared by the professional individuals and associations which define and support both. Sensation fiction, especially, extended the historical reach of the Female Gothic in order to explore how the patriarchal medico-jurism which underwrote the lawful incarceration of the insane within the Victorian private asylum system might be abused in order to variously disinherit and silence inconvenient wives and daughters. Lycanthropy The mythical transformation of a person into a wolf or werewolf. Lych Gate A covered entrance to a churchyard, with shelter for a coffin and mourners, designed to house a funeral party until the processional arrival of the officiating clergyman. A lych or lich wake is the funeral feast that takes place on the night preceding interment.

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M Mad Scientist A phenomenon of, primarily, later Gothic fiction, the mad scientist functions as an institutional and secular replacement for such tyrannical figures in First-Wave Gothic as the proprietary parent or the scheming monk or priest. The origin of the paradigm is, inevitably, the eponymous Victor Frankenstein in the 1818 novel by Mary Shelley (1797–1851), and that character’s egotism, rejection of conventional medical (as well as social) ethics, and lack of foresight are carried over almost verbatim into later portrayals of irresponsible experimentation. The term ‘madness’ is, for the most part, misapplied in such cases. There is much monomania or ruthless egotism but relatively little of absolute insanity: figures in this tradition tend to stress, instead, how devotion to an abstract cause or research ambition may eclipse human altruism. The presence of the mad scientist is especially noteworthy in those Gothic works imbricated with medicine, the most systematic examples appearing in Heart and Science (1882–3) by Wilkie Collins (1824–89) and The Island of Dr Moreau (1896) by H. G. Wells (1866–1946). It should be noted that the term ‘mad doctor’ is not interchangeable with that of mad scientist: the former is frequently used in nineteenth-century writings about lunacy to denote an alienist working within the asylum system. Magic The supposed art of influencing the course of events by occult means, whether through individual practice or else in group rituals. Magic is not the exclusive preserve of the witch, and in Gothic enjoys an ambivalent relationship with science through such figures as the psychic doctor. The rituals of magic embrace, broadly, those actions which seek to change the course of events or the nature of an object or entity; those which aspire to conduct divination through summoning angels, spirits or demons, or necromancy through questioning the dead; and those which impose a level of protection over self and/or other. In popular culture, magic is conventionally divided into white magic, which is beneficent, and black magic, which involves malicious intent and is associated with Satanism. Magical Realism Associated primarily with postmodern writing, magical realism typically combines both realistic and fantastic elements in a representation of the uncanny. Works of this type tend to depict an identifiable and nominally realistic milieu in

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which, none the less, the supernatural or the magical function without question or explanation. Magical realism may also feature hybridity of species or gender, disturbances in the linear representation of time, or analogous peculiarities in the depiction of geographical space. Magick That branch of ritual magic practised by the followers of the British occult practitioner Aleister Crowley (1875–1947), who defined magick (so spelt to distinguish it from ‘stage-magic’ or legerdemain) as ‘the Science and Art of causing Change to occur in conformity with Will’. Crowley was a member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. Male Gothic The theoretical counterpart to Female Gothic, Male Gothic favours graphic horror over subtle terror, a commitment to depictions of the absolute supernatural rather than to seemingly uncanny events that have a human explanation, and a rendering of the heroine in strikingly sexual terms. Where the Female Gothic is particularly associated with the fictions of Ann Radcliffe (1764–1823) and her First-Wave Gothic imitators, the perception of Male Gothic in Gothic criticism draws heavily upon the paradigm of The Monk (1796) by Matthew G. Lewis (1775–1818), a novel heavily freighted with misogynistic violence and incest. It is reductive, however, to suggest that Male Gothic can only be produced by male authors. Masochism The tendency to derive personal pleasure or sexual gratification from experiencing pain. Masochism may have a mental as well as a physical focus: mental contemplation of humiliation and public exposure may be masochistic acts just as much as a submission to actual beating or other violent practices. Mass A Roman Catholic term for the sacrament of the Eucharist, this being a rite of transubstantiation rather than consubstantiation. Medicine An ostensibly secular discourse concerned with the body (and, through the well-being of the body, the mind also), medicine is none the less arguably as much a focus for the Gothic as the supernatural. In its intimate relations with the body, medicine may as easily kill as cure, and it is thus as much concerned with death as with life. In Gothic fiction, medical professionals are frequently depicted as being as much engaged in a destructive experimental nosology as in specifically curative therapeutics. This balance between the professional imperative to cure and the often-egotistical drives to observe and to experiment

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thus easily aligns the figure of the physician or the surgeon with that of the mad scientist. In doing so, such portrayals implicitly interrogate the probity and altruism of professionals generally (for medicine is frequently associated with law through medico-jurism and the formal role of doctors and lawyers in committal for lunacy). Though medicine ought to be considered one of those professional discourses which impose order upon the body, the material with which it is concerned is frequently chaotic and unruly. Surgery, like disease, inflects the body with abjection, and exposes its hidden liquids, noxious secretions and imminent (or immanent) dissolution. Interventive practices may, likewise, deprive the body of members, or may supplement it with prosthetics, implicating a hybridity that suggests, variously, the inhuman and the post-human and replaces the familiar with monstrosity or the uncanny. Mediumship The practice of communicating with the disembodied spirits of the dead, mediumship is central to institutional spiritualism as well as to the conduct of the amateur and domestic séance. Mediumship, in which a mortal acts as an intermediary between the dead and the living, has a considerable heritage. In the Biblical Old Testament, Saul communicates with the deceased prophet Samuel by way of the Witch of Endor (1 Samuel 28:3–15): the Bible, though, forbids the practice (Leviticus 19:31). In modern spiritualism, the ‘familiar spirits’ named in the Bible are characteristically replaced by ‘spirit guides’ who negotiate between the medium and the deceased identities he or she is attempting to contact. The medium may communicate messages from these identities in his or her own voice or in a timbre assumed to be that of the deceased person, answering questions or delivering messages. Non-verbal communication – such as tapping noises, music and the movement of objects in the manner of telekinesis – may also be associated with mediumship. Trance states, symptomatically resembling the lucid sleep of mesmerism and early hypnotism, are also common in mediumistic practice. Medusa In Greek myth, one of the three gorgons. Those who perceived her head, even after she had been killed by Perseus, were turned to stone. The name is occasionally applied figuratively in melodrama to a femme fatale figure whose actions lead to the ruin or suicide of her male admirers.

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Melodrama Originally a theatrical term denoting a sentimentally romantic or sensational play accompanied by music, the term ‘melodrama’ was more broadly applied across the nineteenth century to novels and serial fiction concerned primarily with social scandal. Central to the tradition of popular sensation fiction, melodrama explored and exploited the topicality of issues such as inheritance, illegitimacy, bigamy, marital desertion and unequal access to law. Murders, attempted murders and disappearances were common components of the genre, which enjoyed a wide appeal across all social classes in fiction, on stage and in the cinema well into the twentieth century. The sentimental pathos and sporadic violence of melodrama were often imbricated with comedy in a manner reminiscent of the interplay of horror, terror and humour in comic Gothic. Memento Mori A Latin phrase, which may be translated as ‘Remember you must die’, and which is applied as a noun to a variety of art forms which remind the perceiver of his or her inevitable death. In painting, sculpture and funerary architecture the most commonly encountered form of memento mori is the death’s head or human skull, frequently accompanied by crossed thigh bones. The passive and skeletonised cadaver is, likewise, often displayed on tombs as a reminder that death will triumph over the vanities of life, though more active forms such as the figures in Doom paintings and other representations of the danse macabre may serve a similar purpose. Though the primary theological function of the memento mori is to encourage the perceiver to prepare spiritually for death, other characteristic and associated images (such as the hour glass) may also act as a reminder of the passage of time. In funerary architecture, representations of the broken column and the extinguished torch likewise signal a life ended. Mesmerism A pseudoscience and the precursor to modern hypnotism, mesmerism is a form of clairvoyant, clairaudient and diagnostic trance theorised on the European Continent by Franz Anton Mesmer (1734–1815). Mesmer’s theory was premised upon a latent but intangible force which could be stored in organic and mineral bodies and which was capable of manipulation by certain gifted individuals. This ‘animal magnetism’ functioned in a way analogous to conventional magnetism, its imperceptible and fluid forces being deployed by way of poles and conveniently

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concentrated in accumulating devices (known as baquets) filled with iron filings and magnetised water. Mesmer, using an iron wand or his hands as implements to direct the flow of his own apparently exceptional magnetic energy, claimed to cure by balancing, delivering or removing the personal magnetism of others, this action often causing the patient to collapse in a fit or ‘crisis’ the symptoms of which frequently resembled those of hysteria. Mesmerism was also utilised to diagnose unperceived pathological conditions within the patient’s own body, or to communicate at a distance with those who had been magnetised on a previous occasion. The fluid and magnetic tenets of mesmerism persisted well into the nineteenth century, and though hypnotism discarded these in favour of a functional hypothesis premised upon the physiology of the brain and the eye, the language and imagery of Mesmer’s original practice persisted in popular mythology. As the nineteenth century progressed, hypnotism became a largely tolerated though still speculative anaesthetic and analgesic technique in British, US and Continental medicine, while mesmerism became associated with charlatanism, stage shows and – in fiction – the manipulation and exploitation of the mesmerised subject. Metafiction Particularly associated with postmodern literary, theatrical and cinematic stylistics, metafiction is the incorporation of self-conscious and self-referential elements within a text. In metafiction, any pretence of mimesis or realism is tempered by an accentuation of the text’s stylistics, so that the process by which ostensible reality is created reveals the techniques used in that process. Metafiction has a substantial heritage in Gothic fiction, and elements of self-referentiality can be discerned, for example, in works at the close of First-Wave Gothic – most notably in the comic Gothic of Northanger Abbey (1818) by Jane Austen (1775–1817) or Nightmare Abbey (1818) by Thomas Love Peacock (1785–1866) as well as in later fictions such as ‘The Lady of the House of Love’ (1979) by Angela Carter (1940–92). Miasma A now-discredited theory within the specialism of contagious medicine which argued that fatal epidemics, such as cholera, were not transmitted by interpersonal contact but entered the body through inhaling foul air or mist. Such a body of foul air was known as a miasma, and it was assumed that the morbid content was the product of decaying organic matter. Miasmas

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were particularly associated with waterside areas and densely populated urban environments, ‘night air’ being deemed especially dangerous. Miasmatic theory was discredited in the later nineteenth century with the development of a coherent germ theory. Mirror Reflecting surfaces have a considerable history in Gothic, their function being analogous to that of portraiture. A mirror – sometimes described with the Biblical term, a ‘glass’ – distorts as it reflects and its image is true only in inversion. That image is transient, for when the subject departs the image likewise becomes absent – and yet there is a superstitious heritage which associates the figure in the mirror with the soul of the subject. To break a mirror is conventionally regarded as unlucky – seven years of ill fortune is the accustomed punishment – and reflective surfaces are used also in divination, for example in scrying. Mise en Abyme A term employed in modern critical theory to denote the self-conscious embodiment within a text of an image or artefact which refers to or illustrates the textual whole. Often illustrated with reference to the perpetual regress that might be observed when a perceiver is located in the space between two mirrors, a mise en abyme may occur, for example, in the form of a film within a film, a play within a play or a painting within a painting. Because of the interface between the ostensibly factual nature of the surrounding text and the fictional nature of the embedded mise en abyme, absolute meaning may be destabilised and the fictional nature of the whole text revealed rather than concealed. Mise en abyme is often associated, therefore, with metafiction. Modernism Though nominally an elite movement in art, in architecture and across literature, modernism none the less drew heavily upon the popular-culture contexts of Gothic fiction, and on occasions adopted the supernatural conventions of the ghost story in order to critique, in particular, the secularity of the industrial age. Flourishing between the Victorian fin de siècle and much of the first half of the twentieth century, modernist writing showed a reflective attitude to style that frequently anticipated the later metafiction of postmodernism. Modernist fiction is frequently ambiguous regarding the identity – and on occasions the reality – of characters, and in the Gothic milieu of The Turn of the Screw (1898) by Henry James (1843–1916) the

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supposed certainties of life and death, of presence and absence, and of self and other are conflated, confused and rendered meaningless. Gothic modernism, in common with modernism more broadly, perceptibly critiques the constructed realities of the ostensibly realistic Victorian novel. Part of its assumed function, further, would seem to be to challenge the very exclusivity upon which letters and the canon itself are reared. Many experimental modernist texts tease and taunt the reader by inviting him or her to recognise, if not acknowledge, momentary and fragmentary allusions to Gothic and other popular culture genres. Among these one might note the sporadic references to Dracula (1897) by Bram Stoker (1847–1912) that appear in both The Waste Land (1922) by T. S. Eliot (1888–1965) and Ulysses (1922) by James Joyce (1882–1941). Modernist depictions of the city, particularly those that deploy the flâneur, may likewise be reminiscent of the urban Gothic. Monasticism The institutional separation of monks and nuns from the lay population. Under the monastic system, religious orders function as communities within communities, administering both spiritual and temporal power without reference to their secular counterparts. The exclusive nature of religious communities such as convents, abbeys and monasteries characteristically arouses both curiosity and fear in those outside of their walls – in consequence, in First-Wave Gothic particularly, they are frequently viewed with suspicion, and on occasions physically attacked by the lay population. Monk Within First-Wave Gothic, the monk is overwhelmingly a figure associated with Roman Catholicism, and most especially with the feudal power prototypically exercised by the church. Monasticism, outside of the genre is, however, somewhat more complicated in its nature than the at times crude sectarianism of authors may suggest. A monk may be an ordained priest, and thus empowered under canon law to administer the sacraments (which includes the ability to grant absolution within the confessional). In contrast to this, he may undertake instead a specific role in the administration of charity, the application of charitable medicine, or a choral or prayerful duty within an abbey or monastery. Though monasticism is popularly associated with closed orders, many individual monks were highly mobile, preaching to the laity outside of the bounds of their own communities,

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visiting the sick and poor, or acting as private and confidential confessors within powerful families. Others were active within the Inquisition. In Gothic inflected by Protestantism the monk is often, though not invariably, viewed with suspicion – if not a casuist and a schemer, he may be a sexual predator or a fugitive from justice taking full advantage of the anonymity offered by monastic dress (a monk’s hooded outer garment is known as a habit) or the ritual change of name that acknowledges acceptance within the religious order. Monstrance In Roman Catholic ceremonial, a usually cruciform container in which the consecrated element of bread is displayed during the sacrament of the Mass. Monstrosity With its Latin roots, this term enjoys considerably more implications than a simple association with the chimeric and grotesque monsters of Gothic fiction. Monstrosity serves a functional purpose. As the Latin root of the word – monstrum, from which the word ‘demonstrate’ is also derived – suggests, monsters are significant and portentous as well as frightening: they emblematise issues and problems, display perceived or potential abnormalities, and proclaim the boundaries of religious, social or scientific hegemony. Physical monstrosity may therefore demonstrate the potential of human hubris and ethical irresponsibility, as it does in the constructed hybridity of Frankenstein (1818) by Mary Shelley (1797–1851); or, as degeneration and abjection, it may likewise project the outcome of incautious selfindulgence, as it does in Wormwood (1889) by Marie Corelli (1855–1924). Mental aberrations, often rendered in the form of monomania and obsessions, may be rendered in similar terms of monstrosity, most notably in the sectarian paranoia of The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824) by James Hogg (1770–1835). Monstrosity thus may be exemplified in the body, in the mind and in actions and consequences initiated by both. Mort-Safe An iron cage or frame placed over a grave to prevent the removal of a cadaver by grave robbers. Mummy Though popularly associated with Egypt, the practice of preserving the cadaver in a recognisable form after death through either desiccation or the use of embalming chemicals is a worldwide and ancient phenomenon. The mummified body is uncanny: it resembles, in shape if not in detail, the living body,

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and its presence questions the cultural and taboo demarcations that customarily separate the living from the dead. In Gothic works predicated upon Egyptian relics, much is characteristically made of the return to life of the ancient dead, this being a focus of narratives including the ironic ‘Some Words with a Mummy’ (1845) by Edgar Allan Poe (1809–49) and The Jewel of Seven Stars (1906) by Bram Stoker (1847–1912). Protagonists in the latter novel ambiguously revive the dead by way of Edwardian science overwriting ancient ritual: ‘Lot No. 249’ (1894) by Arthur Conan Doyle (1859–1930), however, deploys necromancy in a Victorian university setting. The mummy is frequently regarded as the custodian of lost knowledge, and it is often intimated that this might become available to modernity with the mummy’s resurrection. The sanctity of the mummy’s resting place, though, is frequently protected by either a curse or else a booby trap, and the process of reviving the corpse may also enrage either the subject or else an attendant deity. Mutation The condition of evolving or departing from the recognised, conventional or accepted conformation of body or mind. Mutation, which is essentially a form of monstrosity, proclaims and demonstrates the fragile nature of both definition and existence, and imposes an imperative upon the perceiving (that is, nonmutated) culture – be it religious, social or medical – to either accommodate or expel the abnormal. Associated with degeneration and, frequently, abjection, the mutant is a mode in which the (often invisible) conventions upon which normality is structured are interrogated and exceeded. N Nazi Gothic First defined by Nick Freeman in 2006, Nazi Gothic is a subgenre within late twentieth-century Gothic that draws, variously, upon conspiracy theories, alternative histories, science fiction, fantasy and dystopia. Premised upon the victory of the Axis Powers at the end of the Second World War, it characteristically depicts scenes of cultural apocalypse consequent on the defeat of the Allies. In an imaginative overwriting which renders recognisable post-war culture uncanny, the Nazis are depicted as exercising totalitarian control over private and public life, medicine and religion, which is at times associated with the occult. Freeman traces the origin of Nazi Gothic from the time-travel

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novel The Sound of His Horn (1952) by Sarban (pseud. J. W. Wall, 1910–89), across a period extending into the 1990s, this being an era characterised, in Britain particularly, by financial uncertainty, cultural turmoil and resurgent xenophobia. Necromancy Divination through communication with the dead. It is forbidden in the Old Testament of the Bible (Deuteronomy 18:9– 12), and this ancient prohibition is still on occasions quoted with reference to modern mediumship. Outside of the institutions of Christian-inflected spiritualism, the practice is largely associated with occult rituals and the necessary deployment of apotropaics. The spirits of the dead are summoned with respect, and though they may be commanded to speak they do not invariably divulge the information requested of them. Those who summon them often do so within the sacred and safe enclosure of a protective circle, drawn on the ground. The border of this ritual space may embody certain sacred names and protective symbols: the interior may also contain a pentagram, pentacle or other sacred images. On occasions the names of archangels, angels or demons are invoked for protection or else summoned as informants in their own right. Necrophilia A culturally and religiously taboo paraphilia in which pleasure is gained through sexual (or sexualised) encounters with the dead. Necrophilia, in the modern and clinical sense of the term, is seldom encountered directly and in explicit detail in Gothic fiction. Among the more pointed examples of the practice, the episode of ‘The Bleeding Nun’ and the ballad ‘Alonzo the Brave and Fair Imogene’ in the First-Wave Gothic novel The Monk (1796) by Matthew G. Lewis (1775–1818) are particularly noteworthy. Necrophilia is implicit also in the romance plots which sometimes accompany vampire narratives, and in any incidence of necromancy which attempts to return a lover from the grave. Necropolis Meaning, literally, a city of the dead, this term is customarily applied to large cemeteries both in the ancient world and in the more substantial developments of modernity. Neoliberal Gothic Defined by the critic Linnie Blake, neoliberal Gothic is that aspect of the genre which, in the contemporary era, depicts and critiques the cultural implication of modern free-market economics. Characteristically, Gothic in the neoliberal tradition takes a pessimistic and desolate view of corporate culture, community

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breakdown and technological progress, concentrating in particular upon scenes of apocalypse, and imagining the collapse of civil and nominally egalitarian society through such traumas as zombie infestations, totalitarian politics and commercially engineered pandemics. In this respect, neoliberal Gothic may be considered as being functionally analogous to some aspects of alternative history and science fiction. Neo-Victorianism An anachronistic adoption of the perceived style or technology of the nineteenth century within the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Nostalgic on the one hand, the deployment of Victorian artefacts, whether authentic or reproduced, may equally reflect an abiding dissatisfaction with modernity, and quite possibly a taste for more colourful times somewhat in the manner of Romanticism. Neo-Victorian style underwrites steampunk in particular, where the technologies and cultures of two forward-looking ages exist in uneasy and spectacular hybridity. New England Gothic A tradition within American Gothic, which draws both its locations and characteristic sense of unease from the oldest European settlements on the east coast of the United States. An uneasy and uncanny relationship with both history and European culture lies at the heart of most New England Gothic works. If Southern Gothic is preoccupied with the memory of slavery, New England Gothic is imbricated on the one hand with the fearful remembrance of dispossessed Native American peoples, and on the other with the lingering guilt associated with the historical repression of witches, adulterers and other perceived sinners under Puritan settler governance. Protestantism is central to the introspective and fearful tone of New England Gothic, and the tradition frequently charts incidences of temptation into sin, leading to the decline of individuals, families and whole communities. The heritage of New England Gothic may be traced to the nineteenth century, with Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–64) authoring some of the earliest exemplar texts. Twentieth-century work in the tradition is dominated by the shorter fiction of H. P. Lovecraft (1890–1937), with its peculiar development of small-town Gothic as a context for physical and cultural degeneration, though the later fiction of Stephen King (1947–) also makes extensive use of locations on America’s Atlantic seaboard.

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New Zealand Gothic Somewhat more nebulous in terms of definition than its colonial Gothic and postcolonial Gothic counterparts, Australian Gothic and Canadian Gothic, New Zealand Gothic can be dated back to the early twentieth century, and to Gothicinflected fictions that depict both the colonised landscape and its indigenous peoples in generic terms. The encounter between European (Pakeha) and first-nation (Maori) culture is central to the genre, with early writers such as Alfred Augustus Grace (1867–1942) chronicling the unequal cultural commerce between settler and indigenous cultures, and later authors, such as Frank Sargeson (1903–82), recalling the residual power of a supposedly eclipsed spiritual culture. To European eyes, the wilderness landscape of New Zealand is undoubtedly uncanny: though its climate may suggest that of Britain, its mountains and forests remain a reminder of the country’s distance from the northern hemisphere, just as the coexistence of indigenous languages alongside British-inflected English functions as an index to the curtailed power of settler hegemony. Newgate Calendar An ostensibly didactic and improving biographical record of criminals confined or executed at London’s Newgate Prison, the Newgate Calendar was published in a variety of forms (often embellished with illustrations), and under a variety of named and anonymous editors, between 1773 and 1886. The genre of Newgate novels drew their plots from many of the crimes recorded in these popular periodical publications, though on occasions without the freighting of moral worthiness and admonishment present in the original. Newgate Novels A popular genre of crime fiction, heavily inflected with Gothic stylistics, which flourished from the 1820s through to the mid-nineteenth century. The Newgate novels drew their readership – and in many cases, their plots also – from the Newgate Calendar, though the relish with which violent crime was often described within their pages frequently attracted criticism with regard to their morally suspect character. The works of Edward Bulwer-Lytton (1803–73) and William Harrison Ainsworth (1805–82) are especially associated with the tradition, though Oliver Twist (1837–8) by Charles Dickens (1812–70) is often regarded as a Newgate novel. Nightmare This popular term for a traumatic or horrifying dream is derived from early beliefs that such experiences were caused by

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a ‘mare’ or demon which sat upon the sleeper and so produced the sensations of choking and suffocation often associated with disturbed sleep. The origin of the term is conveyed graphically in the painting The Nightmare (exhibited 1782) by Henry Fuseli (1741–1825), where a grotesque and dwarfish figure (possibly an incubus) sits upon the female victim’s chest and a horse’s head intrudes through an open window. Noble Savage Proposed in the novel Emile (1762) by Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–78), the noble savage is an idealised human individual, apparently inherently good and in a state of both innocence and ignorance with regard to ‘civilised’ or communal behaviour. Rousseau’s notion that the manners and morals of the noble savage will be shaped by experience places that figure at risk of corruption when it is exposed to the sophistication of civilisation, and the outcome of the cultural encounter is usually one where the idealised state is eclipsed by worldly preoccupations. In Gothic, the figure appears not merely in Frankenstein (1818) by Mary Shelley (1797–1851) but also in Melmoth the Wanderer (1820) by Charles Robert Maturin (1780–1824). It is a figure of allegorical as well as tragic significance. Nonconformist In England, a member of a Protestant church which does not conform to the doctrines of the Church of England. Nun A member of a religious community of women, often dwelling within an abbey, convent or similar institution, and frequently bound by personal vows to observe poverty, chastity and obedience to ecclesiastical law. In Gothic, nuns are often ambivalent figures, with their distinctive clothing and ordered lifestyle rendering them uncanny to the lay population. Though they may be depicted in First-Wave Gothic as compassionate friends to the repressed and dispossessed, they are also frequently encountered in a more hostile form as gaolers imposing the patriarchal will of the Roman Catholic church. Nuns became less popular in Gothic following the eighteenth century fin de siècle, though the anonymous tract-novel The Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk (1836) has been widely accepted in Gothic criticism as a key work in Canadian Gothic. In Britain, the Church of England suppressed its male and female religious orders during the Reformation, though such communities were revived in the nineteenth century.

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Nymph In classical mythology, a minor female nature divinity, dwelling in the wilderness and associated especially with woods, groves, springs and streams. O Obeah A variety of magic or witchcraft, also known as Obi, originating in West Africa and transferred to the West Indies through slavery in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Obeah coexisted with conventional Christianity in the West Indian colonies, and had applications not merely in bewitching (by way of the obi-man or obi-woman) but also in palliative and curative medicine. Occult Originally meaning that which is kept hidden or not disclosed, the term ‘occult’ is now popularly applied in relation to magic, astronomy, alchemy and similar hermetic arts. Acknowledging this heritage in secrecy, ‘the occult’ nominally suggests not merely the supernatural, but also ritual practices conducted by initiates, including divination and necromancy as well as the collective ceremonials of Satanism and witchcraft. Odyle A supposed but intangible force, analogous to magnetism or electricity, which may be directed by the practitioners of several of the nineteenth-century pseudosciences which succeeded mesmerism. It is also known as od. Omen A phenomenon or unusual event, taken as a portent of some forthcoming incidence of good – or, more popularly, of evil – import. An ill omen may on occasion be offset by an apotropaic. Onanism A medical term for masturbation, entering popular usage in the eighteenth century and derived from a loose interpretation of the fatal sin of Onan in the Old Testament (Genesis 38:9–10). Early moral qualms regarding the allegedly injurious effects of masturbation developed, in the nineteenth century, into a medical panic which integrated both semen and blood into a spermatic economy whose balance was essential to individual and social well-being. Within the spermatic economy, semen was supposed to be a concentrated by-product of blood. The masturbator wasted his seminal resources, and in doing so temporarily depleted the quality and quantity of his blood. Habitual masturbation was associated with physiological degeneration, and the decline of the individual was rhetorically associated with the perceived decline of national physique and

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morals. The physiognomy of the eponymous vampire of Dracula (1897) by Bram Stoker (1847–1912) has long been regarded in Gothic criticism as being shaped by contemporary depictions of the masturbator. Oneiromancy The process of divination by dreams. Opium The secretion of the opium poppy, dried and further refined in order to make a range of analgesic, soporific (and highly addictive) drugs. Opium was the favoured drug of Romanticism and was often ingested in the liquid form of laudanum. Other opiate preparations, common throughout the nineteenth century, included ‘Black Drop’, ‘Chlorodyne’, ‘Dover’s Powder’, ‘Gee’s Linctus’ and ‘Godfrey’s Cordial’. Opium was also smoked recreationally in so-called ‘opium dens’. The possession and sale of opiates in Britain were legally restricted in 1868. Orientalism As the critic Edward Said notes in his seminal work Orientalism (1978), Orientalism is a historical and ideological process through which the west processes and presents the east (or ‘orient’) and its cultures. It involves the imposition and popularisation of images and myths – such as the association of the east with the supernatural, mysticism, deceit or sexual licence – as well as the paradoxical suggestion that the east, though technologically less advanced than the west, remains somehow a threat which must be contained or neutralised. Orientalism is a determining force in colonial Gothic as well as in western fantasies of invasion and reverse colonisation. Original Sin In Christian culture, that sin which is associated with Adam’s disobedience and which has been passed down as the common inheritance of subsequent humanity. Formulated by St Augustine (354–430 ce), it is central to several of the sacraments of Roman Catholicism, and is utilised elsewhere in Christian apologetics to corroborate the purported depravity of humanity. Ossianism This term may refer either to the imaginative world represented in the purported translations of the poetry of Ossian or Oisin (1760–3) by James Macpherson (1736–96), or to other literary texts produced in that tradition of faux Scots history. The authenticity of Macpherson’s own epic poetry, which he presented as translations of a third-century original, was rapidly questioned and dismissed in the learned periodicals which structured eighteenth-century antiquarianism, and the whole issue of its validating

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by a translator adopting the role of fictional editor may well have influenced the framing of the initiatory text of First-Wave Gothic, The Castle of Otranto (1764) by Horace Walpole (1717–97). Ouija Board A device for communicating with the dead, and thus a form of divination by the dead. The term is derived from the French and German words for ‘yes’, and the design of the board itself appears to date from the late nineteenth century. Conventionally, it is made up of a flat surface upon which are printed the twenty-six letters of the alphabet, the numbers from zero to nine, and the simple responses ‘yes’ and ‘no’. Those participating in the séance either each rest a finger on an upturned glass or else use similarly a small pointer on rollers, akin to a planchette, in order to allow the spirit to direct this index to the letters it wishes to spell out into words and sentences. The phrase ‘Good bye’ is also often included on the board, so as to permit the alleged spirit to signal the close of communication. P Paganism Though, nominally, this term might be applied to any religious affiliation that is not Christian, it is normally deployed in Gothic in connection with religions premised upon the ancient deities that preceded Christianity. These more ancient faiths are popularly associated with occult practice and, on occasion, rites of human sacrifice or sexual excess: as such, they may function as a counterpart to the controlled and ordered – or repressed – tenor of Christian life. The ancient deities of paganism – most notably Pan – have historically been interpreted as incarnations of Satan, and their worship condemned as Satanism. The survival of such practices into the Christian era, and particularly into near-contemporary modernity as neo-paganism, signals the limits – and potentially the eclipse – of both familiar religion and the cultural milieux it has generated. The worship of Satan (who is, after all, a Judaeo-Christian demiurge) has no place in neo-paganism and modern Wicca. To embrace such beliefs, to practise pagan rites is, implicitly, to retreat from modernity and secularity as well as Christianity. Pan The classical Greek god of pastures, forests, herds and flocks entered British Gothic in the Victorian fin de siècle, bringing with him the chaos of Pan-ic. Pan’s historical physicality – goat-like, horned and bearded and with cloven hooves – anticipates that of

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Satan, and his animal virility (which is perceived as, variously, homosexual and heterosexual) likewise associates him with Paganism and a joyous and earthy promiscuity inimical to Christian propriety. That said, Pan represents also a type of liberation from repressive modernity – a rural rather than urban consciousness, practising self-indulgence rather than restraint, bringing anarchy into an ordered world and leaving no one he encounters untouched by the experience. Already revived as a cultural icon for late Victorian decadence, Pan was popularised in Gothic by Arthur Machen (1863–1947), whose novella The Great God Pan (1890/1894) embedded the deity in a medical experiment. Pan’s rape of the experimental subject leads to a progressive degeneration with physical, mental and moral implications, embracing both her and her offspring. The destructive nature of Pan’s presence is likewise signalled in the Edwardian Gothic of E. F. Benson (1867–1940) and the Georgian Gothic of Algernon Blackwood (1869–1951), both of whom depict Pan as a nature deity in terms that anticipate the ecogothic strain of academic ecocriticism. Paranoid Gothic A tradition within Gothic that depicts characters acting within situations of epistemological uncertainty. This includes those figures confined inside labyrinth-like and unfamiliar environments, characters being pursued or persecuted for reasons of which they are wholly ignorant, and those entrapped by the uncanny landscapes of the dream state. The state of paranoia may be suggestive also of a doppelganger condition, where it is externalised issues and introspections that symbolically – or literally – pursue the victim. Parapsychology The study of alleged mental phenomena – such as clairvoyance, mediumship, telekinesis and telepathy – that cannot currently be explained by the application, or interpretation, of orthodox psychology. Parapsychologists have also, historically, interested themselves in apparitions and ghosts, the claims of spiritualism, and the use of devices such as the Ouija board and planchette. Though parapsychology has on occasion been identified as one of the pseudosciences, it is practised as a serious and scientific programme of investigation by psychologists and others with orthodox qualifications and credible experience. Its disputed position in modern science and psychology is a reminder of how orthodox science still exercises an authority over what should constitute a serious and legitimate subject for study.

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Parody Gothic has always embodied a sense of irony and parody, given its structural origins in the playful fakery of The Castle of Otranto (1764) by Horace Walpole (1717–97). This taste for self-conscious allusion, whether it be realised in the form of comic Gothic or more profoundly explored as metafiction, is a relatively constant aspect of the genre, and signals less its tendency to resist stylistic innovation and more the acute sensibility and sensitivity of its readership in recognising, and responding to, generic indicators. Pathology As a practice, pathology bridges science and medicine. Though popularly associated with the autopsy or post-mortem examination, the scope of pathology extends to the investigation of morbid developments in living tissue and the study of infection more broadly. Pentacle A five-pointed star or pentagram, surrounded by a circle. Utilised as an emblem or protective tool in ritual magic, the pentacle is also often worn in the form of jewellery by pagans and practitioners of Wicca. Pentagram A five-pointed star, each arm of which is of equal length: when surrounded by a circle a pentagram is known as a pentacle. The pentagram and pentacle are popularly regarded as symbols of the occult, and in particular associated with the practices of ritual magic and Wicca. In modern paganism, the five points symbolise the elements of earth, air, fire and water and the quality of spirit: the surrounding circle symbolically brings these components into unity and balance. In popular depictions of ritual magic, the pentacle is frequently depicted as being painted or chalked upon the floor, its surrounding circle enclosing a protected ritual space in which a witch or other adept may safely undertake necromancy, divination or the calling of demons, angels or spirits. Ritual words or symbols are on occasions inscribed within the rim of the circle of the pentacle and, in some depictions (primarily those connected with explicit Satanism rather than paganism), the Pan-like goat-face of Satan is superimposed upon the pentagram: in popular culture, a pentacle with its single point at the top indicates the practice of white magic, where one with the single point at the base represents black magic. In Christianity, the pentagram has been used as a symbol of the five wounds – in the hands, feet and side – of Christ.

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Penny Dreadful Generically, a cheap and sensational work of fiction, common in nineteenth-century Britain, and an alternative to the more extensive and expensive Newgate novels. The term has been applied at different time to derivative novellas which drew their stories from First-Wave Gothic somewhat in the manner of blue books; to later original works in single-volume format, often celebrating the ambivalent morals and actions of some semi-mythological criminal figure such as Dick Turpin or Jack Sheppard; and to serial publications depicting supernatural figures such as Spring-Heeled Jack or Varney, the Vampyre. Pepper’s Ghost Theorised as early as the sixteenth century, though named after a nineteenth-century British scientist, Pepper’s Ghost is a piece of theatre technology which allows a person or object to be effectively projected onto a stage from a second location not within the field of vision of the audience. The effect, which is achieved through a glass sheet and the systematic deployment and withdrawal of lighting, allows figures to appear and disappear, with a controllable degree of transparency, somewhat in the manner of a ghost. Phantasm Nominally, an apparitional experience, such as that of perceiving a ghost. In psychoanalytical terms, a phantasm is a mental image, the product of a fantasy, and thus an expression of desire. Phantasmagoria Historically, a ‘magic lantern’ show, especially popular in the Victorian period, where transparent slides, screened usually from several projectors, were combined to make an image which moved, blurred or transformed with comedic or horrific effect. The possibilities of phantasmagoria influenced early Gothic film. Phantom A ghost or apparition, particularly one which manifests in a transparent or semi-transparent form. Phrenology One of the nineteenth-century pseudosciences, phrenology claims that an individual’s character can be discerned from the bumps and hollows of his or her skull. When associated with mesmerism in the form of phreno-magnetism, phrenology was deployed as a diagnostic tool so that perceived imperfections could be corrected by the application of animal magnetism or odyle. Phrenology is occasionally explicitly referenced in Victorian Gothic, most notably in The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824) by James Hogg (1770–1835) and in ‘The Lifted Veil’ (1859) by George Eliot (1819–80).

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Physiognomy The ancient practice of divining characters from faces was given a scientific tenor by nineteenth-century writers, many of whom drew upon mid-Victorian phrenology and fin de siècle scientific criminology. Such features as the squareness of the jaw, the shape of the nose and the angle of the brow were read as indications of strength of purpose, moral probity and relative intelligence, with prejudices derived from anti-Semitism and colonial-era racism adding a further imperative that might Other certain individuals due to their perceived degeneration or atavism. Though culturally pervasive, and highly influential in shaping the physical and facial characteristics of fictional protagonists, physiognomy is resolutely one of the pseudosciences and is not recognised by contemporary medicine. Picturesque A philosophical counterpart to the Sublime, and reminiscent somewhat of the Beautiful as defined in the aesthetic system of Edmund Burke (1729–97), the picturesque is pleasing and, on occasions, thought-provoking, but lacks the element of awe necessary to stimulate the uplifting emotion of terror. The picturesque suggests the homely, the domestic and the familiar rather than the fearful prospect of the mountain and the wilderness. Plague Pandemic is a common context in that branch of Gothic concerned with apocalypse, and the spread of plague though civilisation – often by way of the very trade routes and through the very commercial technologies that have brought wealth and well-being – is usually coterminous with the collapse of organised civil society. Though fatal pestilence in Gothic can be traced back at least as far as The Last Man (1826) by Mary Shelley (1797–1851), it has been revived in recent years in connection with zombie fiction and film where, characteristically, death, paradoxically, is ‘cured’ by some pervasive and unknown intervention into the integrity of living flesh. Planchette This term may refer to a pointing device, used in conjunction with a Ouija board, or else to a small, wheeled platform fitted with a pen or pencil and used in the production of automatic writing – this latter being writing dictated by a disembodied spirit to an entranced medium in some forms of spiritualism. Poltergeist Derived from a German term meaning ‘angry ghost’, a poltergeist typically does not manifest in human shape but rather indicates its presence by moving objects, making inexplicable noises, or else indulging in violent acts against those in its

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assumed presence. Though spiritualism has on occasions associated poltergeist activity with the angry or frustrated dead, modern parapsychology has claimed that such events are the product of psychic powers unknown to conventional science and embodied in the mortals around whom the incidents take place. Poniard A small, slim dagger, such as might be carried unseen by a bravo or assassin as depicted commonly in First-Wave Gothic. The French spelling, poignard, is sometimes used. Porphyria A metabolic disorder which manifests itself both through the nervous system and upon the surface of the sufferer’s skin. In the case of a patient suffering cutaneous porphyria, the skin is rendered highly sensitive to sunlight, and can blister and grow red following exposure, remaining prone to further damage afterwards. The patient’s urine will also often display a reddish or purple tinge. In some cases, the patient may also exhibit abnormal hair growth. Collectively, these symptoms have been considered in that area of Gothic criticism inflected by medicine as an explanation for those folkloric descriptions of the vampire and werewolf that preceded the fictional representation of such supernatural entities, though such interpretations have been dismissed by more recent clinical responses. Portraiture A portrait, if it aspires to verisimilitude to the subject, is invariably uncanny. It is a two-dimensional representation of a three-dimensional original, a moment frozen in time. Its inability to age alongside of its subject renders it a doppelganger proclaiming the irretrievability of the past and the binary of youth and age, of present health and future infirmity, of life now and inevitable death in the future. Portraiture has a long history in Gothic. A mobile portrait appears in The Castle of Otranto (1764) by Horace Walpole (1717–97), releasing a portentous ghost whose intervention changes the current course of action. Later writers, such as Edgar Allan Poe (1809–49), fetishise the portrait as an emblem of erotic absence, the age-resistant image gaining a type of vampire status at the expense of the fragile sitter – though in The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) by Oscar Wilde (1854–1900), it is the painting which deteriorates as its possessor’s sinful life progresses. Possession The occupation of a body by a spirit that is not its own. Several incidences of possession are recorded in the New Testament (Matthew 8:28–32, 12:43–5), where the possessing

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‘unclean spirit’ is represented as a demon or devil who causes the host body to injure itself or exhibit antisocial or irreligious behaviours that suggest madness. The casting out of such possessing spirits is known as exorcism. Postcolonial Gothic A counterpart of (and logical successor to) colonial Gothic, postcolonial Gothic is that branch of the genre produced in nations that were formerly colonised, particularly by European imperialism. Postcolonial fictions are frequently haunted by the metaphorical ghosts of their colonised pasts, and may mobilise these traumatic histories through the monstrosity of significant characters and practices depicted either in their historical setting or as residual figures in the contemporary landscape. The postcolonial world most obviously embraces the former European empires in North and South America, the Caribbean, Australasia and Asia – though the term may be applied more subtly to the writings of national consciousnesses developing within nation states: one might consider here the small number of Latino authors writing within American Gothic, the distinctive tenor of Scottish Gothic within British Gothic, and the generic consciousness of aboriginal writers within Australian Gothic. Postfeminist Gothic Defined for the purposes of Gothic criticism by Benjamin Brabon and Stéphanie Genz in 2007, postfeminist Gothic can be described as the interface of the genre with postfeminism – this latter being the complex and often contradictory attitudes displayed towards feminism at the twentieth-century fin de siècle. On the one hand a critique of the limitations of the Female Gothic, it is likewise a revision of which texts might rightly be defined as Gothic and how that definition is complicated through their adoption of generic signifiers of approved and deviant femininity. Among the central themes that critics in the field characteristically discuss are the violence and power structures of patriarchal and heterosexual relationships (this latter allowing a useful interface with queer Gothic); the complex nature of gender construction in narrative and generic structure; the interface of historical Gothic fictions and modern popular culture; and the portrayal of the physicality of the female body. Postfeminist Gothic is a still-developing critical approach, and these selected focal points are by no means an exhaustive résumé of the field’s preoccupations.

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Post-Human A term which describes bodies that, despite having experienced conventional death, are still active or mobile. Such entities are uncanny, as they resemble the familiar human form – and are possibly also perceived as the body of a known person – but lack the precise identity of the personality which once occupied that body. Among the more familiar post-human forms, the vampire, werewolf and zombie are prominent, though post-humanity may also be perceived in the flesh–machine hybridity of the cyborg. Whether wholesome in its flesh or visibly decaying, the posthuman body is implicitly redolent with abjection. Premature Burial The possibility of vivisepulture, the interment of a living body within the tomb, is an ancient and fearful counterpart of the inevitability of human death. The historical limitations of medicine and the sanitary need to rapidly remove the victims of plague and other contagious disorders on occasions prompted the accidental burial or entombment of those still living, and the subsequent exhumation of their visibly distressed bodies might well have underwritten fears of the possession of the cadaver by a vampire or demon. ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ (1839) and ‘The Premature Burial’ (1844) by Edgar Allan Poe (1809–49) are, arguably, the central paradigm texts in Gothic, and emphasise the potential of catalepsy in the misdiagnosis of death. ‘The Room in the Dragon Volant’ (1872) by J. Sheridan Le Fanu (1814–73), however, utilises a drug-induced coma in connection with the criminal disposal of a living body. Priest Though this term may be applied to someone who administers the rites of any faith, it is usually associated with Christian ministry in Gothic fiction. In this context, a priest is a man in what are termed Holy Orders, this clerical qualification empowering him to administer the sacraments of his church as well as provide counselling to the living and the ceremonies of burial to the dead. Outside of Roman Catholicism, the term ‘priest’ (which has residual implications of one who offers a sacrifice) is on occasions regarded with suspicion: in Protestantism, therefore, a range of other titles are commonly employed for those undertaking the same role. These include vicar, minister, pastor, celebrant and (in military circles particularly) padre. Prologue A body of text, often relatively short, which precedes the main body of a short story, novel or longer poem. When provided by the author and associated with the original publication

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(or some subsequent act of republishing) these should be read as an integral part of the whole narrative, as they frequently impose conditions upon how that which follows should be regarded by the reader. In Gothic, prefatory statements advanced in the ostensible voice of the author may provide crucial information with regard to historical or cultural context, as they do, notably, in the two prefaces to Frankenstein (1818, 1831) by Mary Shelley (1797–1851). When provided by a self-consciously powerful fictional editor they may establish or undermine the authority of that which follows, even to the point of metafiction. Protestantism A Protestant, nominally, is any Christian who is not in communion with the Roman Catholic church – though the term is not customarily applied to the Orthodox churches of Greece and Russia. Protestantism arose in the sixteenth century, the Reformation being prompted by a perception of corruption within the administration, and idolatry within the sacraments, of contemporary Roman Catholicism. There is no singular Protestant church, and the myriad sects which collectively make up Protestantism include such familiar denominations as the Church of England (also known as the Anglican or Episcopalian church), Baptists, Methodists and Presbyterians. Protestant spirituality is premised upon an individual – rather than ceremonial, sacramental or priest-centred – relationship with the Deity; eschews the use of both saintly relics and ‘graven images’ (Exodus 20:4) such as statues and crucifixes as focal points for devotion; rejects the use of intermediaries such as the Madonna or saints between God and humanity; and aspires to transmit the scriptures in an accessible contemporary language rather than through the medium of Latin. In Protestant-based public culture, the power of the church and its representatives are typically balanced with those of secular authority. Protestantism thus plays an important role in national identity and cultural demarcation: conventionally it marks off, in Gothic, the industrious and clear-sighted culture of Britain from the superstitious, residual feudalism of much of the European Continent. It may likewise underscore the perceived congruence of politics and culture that ostensibly link Britain and the United States in some Victorian literatures. Pseudoscience Pseudosciences are intellectual practices whose organisation and rhetoric superficially resemble those of conventional

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science but whose outcomes and epistemological logic ultimately fail to satisfy widely accepted criteria of proof. Among the better-known pseudosciences are mesmerism and phrenology, both of which demonstrate practically the function which pseudoscientific thought frequently plays in the development of medicine. Psychic Doctor An occasional figure in both Victorian Gothic and Edwardian Gothic, the psychic doctor is typically an individual qualified in conventional medicine but who has speculative interests also in metaphysics and the supernatural. In his activities, he may be a vampire hunter, professionally involved in psychical research, or else little but a dilettante investigating ostensible occurrences of the supernatural that simply interest him. In Gothic criticism, the psychic doctor is popularly regarded as having been first developed by J. Sheridan Le Fanu (1814–73) in the linking figure of Dr Hesselius in the ghost story collection In a Glass Darkly (1872). Later deployments of the device include Professor Van Helsing in Dracula (1897) by Bram Stoker (1847–1912), and the eponymous heroes of John Silence: Physician Extraordinary (1908) by Algernon Blackwood (1869–1951) and Carnacki the Ghost Finder (1913) by William Hope Hodgson (1877–1918). Psychic Entertainment A popular genre of contemporary televisual entertainment, psychic entertainment is most often presented as a modernised version of psychical research. Typically, a supposedly haunted house or other location associated with ghosts or the supernatural is investigated by a team whose specialisms frequently embrace not merely the ‘hard’ sciences but also pseudoscience and spiritualism. The context of the site is usually presented first as a type of prologue, followed by footage of the investigation itself, this latter often employing night-vision cameras and filming from a number of perspectives, either in live-action format or else edited to make a chronological narrative interspersed with moments which consider an occurrence perceived simultaneously from a number of standpoints. This ‘evidence’ is characteristically followed by a ‘reveal’ and analysis of the data. Though highly popular in both Britain and the United States in the first decade of the twenty-first century, psychic entertainment has declined in recent years. Representative titles include, in the United Kingdom, Most Haunted (2002–10; revived 2013), Derek Acorah’s Ghost Towns (2005–6) and

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Ghosthunting With … (2006–11); in the US, Paranormal State (2007–11); and, in Canada, The Girly Ghosthunters (2005). The term ‘psychic entertainment’ is also occasionally deployed to describe public events employing mediumship or clairvoyance, albeit in a less intimate environment than that conventionally associated with spiritualism and the séance. Psychical Research The investigation of ghosts, mediumship, hauntings, telepathy and similar supernatural phenomena by way of systematic and scientific methodologies. The origins of organised psychical research can be traced to the nineteenth century and the foundation of The Ghost Club in 1862 and The Society for Psychical Research (SPR) in 1882. Both organisations attracted authors – Charles Dickens (1812–70) was an early member of the Ghost Club, and Algernon Blackwood (1869–1951) reputedly conducted unofficial investigations for the SPR – as well as philosophers, physicians and scientists generally. The tone of much modern psychical research is open but sceptical, and it tends to distance itself from the spectacle of psychic entertainment. The development of psychical research is a central context for the psychic doctor in both Edwardian Gothic and Georgian Gothic, and may well have exercised some influence over its nascent presence in later Victorian Gothic. Psychobiography That branch of Gothic criticism which attempts to explain the content or implications of a text by recourse to an author’s unconscious or subconscious motivations. Where cultural materialism lays stress upon those factors in an author’s contextual history which appear in documented or at least broadly verifiable form – such factors, for example, as education, religious beliefs, medical history or political affiliation – psychobiography projects motivations from such psychoanalytical and post-psychoanalytical concepts as sibling rivalry, the Oedipus or Electra complexes, or self-hatred premised upon residual guilt or a response to body image based upon abjection. The materially unprovable nature of the motivations premised in psychobiography inevitably render this approach questionable in the eyes of materialist criticism, though it retains a substantial following. Psychogeography A twentieth- and twenty-first-century theoretical mode of examining the effect of place upon emotion and behaviour, closely associated with reading the urban environment and

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drawing heavily upon the flâneur as a paradigm for the selfreflective explorer. In Gothic criticism, it is especially relevant to the study of urban Gothic. Q Quack A charlatan (and sometimes itinerant) practitioner of medicine. Patent medicines are sometimes referred to as quack nostrums, whilst certain pseudosciences have historically been associated with quack medicine. Queer Gothic Queer theory, which forms a logical development from the critical interrogations historically provided by women’s studies and gender studies, was applied in Gothic criticism as early as 1985 by way of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s seminal study Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire. The initial application of queer theory to the genre made much of the experience of authors who identified themselves – or were identified subsequently – as male homosexuals or lesbians, most notably where the aesthetics of popular fiction allowed freer expression of their sexual identity. Criticism, likewise, noted the way in which the scripted experience of fictional Gothic protagonists could be regarded as coded expressions of same-sex preferences and encounters. One might note here in particular how vampires have been interpreted as a vehicle by which to express both oral sexuality and the risk of promiscuity in the age of AIDS, or how the exaggerated masculinity of the Gothic Hero may perversely problematise heterosexuality. More recent developments in queer theory have supplemented this early drive towards charting the specifically homosexual author and text and have moved towards a more wide-ranging and metaphorical reading of the queer as pertaining to that which is individually or culturally – rather than simply sexually – different. In this sense, the concept of queerness may be applied to any figure who exists as an outsider – whether these be the isolato, the socially, religiously or culturally dissonant, the disabled or even the Gothic child. Queer Street To be in Queer Street is, conventionally, to be in a state of financial difficulty, such as near or actual bankruptcy. The association of the first part of the term with perceived homosexuality, however, might suggest the difficulty to be caused by blackmail having been levied – a situation emblematised in Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) by Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–94).

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Quick An archaic term meaning to be alive or animated. The English translation of the Nicene Creed, which is a statement of conventional Christian belief, notes that God will come to judge ‘the quick and the dead’. R Räuberroman In German Gothic, those fictions which deal with robbers, particularly when these are depicted as Romantic rebels against a corrupt society redolent with feudalism. Reformation, The A cultural as well as religious upheaval in the European sixteenth century, the Reformation did considerably more than demarcate a reformed Protestantism from an unregenerate Roman Catholicism: it divided the European Continent politically as well as spiritually; was the catalyst for profound changes in both statute law and broader social existence; and generated the often violent hostility of a Counter-Reformation underpinned, in part, by the Inquisition and the suppression of heresy. The Protestant Reformers questioned not merely the temporal authority of the pope and his minsters, but also their theological interpretation of the Bible, their attitude to the sacraments, and their imposition of clerical celibacy. Reformed Christianity rejected the pope’s precedence as the Vicar of Christ upon earth and in some cases – most notably the Presbyterian denominations – undid the centralised hierarchical structure of the church, discarding the office of bishop and restructuring governance on a more localised (and thereby accountable) level. The Reformers likewise rejected many Roman Catholic practices, particularly those connected with the sacerdotal extirpation of sin, which they saw as being open to financial abuse. The central political consequence of the Reformation in Britain was to facilitate a pervasive self-image through which to distance both self and nation from the Roman Catholic Continent and, by implication, from the majority population of Ireland also. Regional Gothic That aspect of the genre which locates its fictions away from the capital city specifically, and in many cases on the margins of local conurbations. Regional Gothic is premised upon the ostensibly reduced level of control exercised by central governance in the regions. It frequently assumes that in such places ‘primitive’ or ‘regressive’ beliefs and institutions can survive even within a culture nominally included within national

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cultural and political boundaries. Regional Gothic is uncanny and closely allied to tourist Gothic – the regional milieu is characteristically simultaneously familiar and strange, and the position of the traveller to the regions is an uncertain one. He or she may be a person of substance or of knowledge in their own metropolitan space: in this imperfectly understood environment they are vulnerable, disorientated, and often incapable of communicating their situation to those they have left behind in the metropolis. In England-centred British Gothic, the regional consciousness is broadly divided into the ‘national’ Gothics of Irish Gothic, Scottish Gothic, Welsh Gothic and – increasingly – Cornish Gothic, though the English regions – most notably the South West, the North and East Anglia – have their own vibrant literary and folkloric traditions which range from horror to the ghost story. Revenant One who returns to their original place: in Gothic, the term may be applied to a ghost, but is used also in connection with the vampire. Both supernatural beings return from death to the abode of the living. Revenge Drama A critical term used to describe a popular tradition in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English drama, usually premised upon violent acts of vengeance. Revenge tragedy embodied many of the elements that were to distinguish later Gothic textuality. These included an interest in the detail and excessive depiction of violence, the presence of ghosts and supernatural portents, intimations of taboo acts such as incest or cannibalism, and of madness and moral degeneration. Jacobean tragedy deployed, in particular, the villain as textual hero, anticipating the ambivalent status of the Gothic Hero in First-Wave Gothic. Ritterroman That branch of German Gothic which foregrounded historical milieux, and deployed the social as well as military conventions of chivalry as a central plot device. The German word Ritter means ‘knight’. Robot An artificial and usually humanoid machine, capable of performing tasks upon human direction and, on occasions, of existing as an independently thinking entity. The word itself was coined in 1920 and has Czech literary origins. The uncanny relationship of robotic bodies to human physiological outlines, and the performance of those physical and mental tasks normally associated with humanity, associate the robot with those

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cultural energies through which the ab-human, the cyborg and other embodiments of perceived hybridity might be examined. The potential for the robot to act independently of human direction, even to think for itself, poses questions with regard to comparative morality and altruism, and thereby characteristically initiates an implicit critique of humanity, particularly in speculative science fiction. Roman Catholicism Numerically the largest Christian denomination, and a focus for much of the polemical energy of British Gothic in particular, Roman Catholicism has maintained a consistent presence within the genre from the very start of First-Wave Gothic. With eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British culture being so defined by a consciousness of Protestantism, the Roman Catholic church proved a convenient Other upon which to unload pervasive fears of invasion and arbitrary power, even where these were associated with the anti-clerical culture of the French Revolution: the judgement chambers of the Inquisition were similar in implication to the secret tribunals of the Reign of Terror. The spiritual traditions of Roman Catholicism, as expressed both in that church’s characteristic buildings – the abbey, the convent – and in its emblematic figures – the monk, the nun, the priest – were alien to a post-Reformation Britain which had removed them from national culture and formally associated the church with the local leadership of the monarch rather than the more distant autocracy of the pope. These things became the focus of an abiding sense of suspicion, a reminder of the feudalism of theologically unreformed nations, and an index of the superstition and idolatry practised beyond English shores. That said, Gothic criticism has in the recent past identified a somewhat ambivalent attitude to some aspects of Roman Catholicism, whether it be in the compassionate attitudes displayed by some monks or nuns, or in the power of the church being vested more in what people believed it might do rather than what it actually could do. Though the fictional presence of the Roman Catholic church in Gothic fiction has lessened somewhat through the secular ambience of the twentieth and twentyfirst centuries, it retains a residual (and problematic) function in Southern Gothic, where New Orleans is seen as a coexistent interface for otherwise conflicting Christian and voodoo beliefs and practices.

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Roman Noir In the criticism of French Gothic, a term which may be applied both to a sentimental and adventurous tradition of francophone novel writing which flourished in the first part of the eighteenth century, and to later works translated into French from anglophone First-Wave Gothic. Romanticism A movement in European art, music, literature and aesthetics which influenced elite taste profoundly from the eighteenth-century fin de siècle through to the mid-nineteenth century. The aesthetic origins of Romanticism are greatly indebted to the theory of the Sublime propounded by Edmund Burke (1729–97) and popularised in First-Wave Gothic fiction. If the aesthetics of Romanticism were associated with an enhanced emotionalism premised upon awe and contemplation, its spirituality was imbricated with a rejection of Enlightenment tenets of reason and an embracing of the stimulating effects of fear and superstition. Romanticism preferred nature to the city (and it is thus an intellectual context for both academic ecocriticism and the ecogothic), the spectacular to the merely picturesque, and the wild to the domesticated. It traded upon representations of extremes of emotions: fear, isolation, self-pity and self-hatred. Politically, in its earlier days at least, it flirted with radicalism and lionised the working classes and the poor as a collective incarnation of the noble savage, though the proponents of this opinion were frequently well-educated and wealthy members of elite society. First-Wave Gothic in a sense occupies a mid-point between Romanticism’s theoretical origins in the mid-eighteenth century and its great cultural flowering in the first decades of the nineteenth. The youthful Romantic poets of the first two decades of the nineteenth century consumed Gothic fiction, and on occasions they also wrote within the identifiable tradition of the genre: yet, until comparatively recently, outside of Gothic criticism, the Gothic was considered a bastardised version of all that Romanticism aspired to. The relationship between the two is, as this chronology suggests, far more complex – as complex, perhaps, as that between Gothic and modernism. Rosicrucian A member of one of several secret societies, active since at least the seventeenth century. The term ‘Rosicrucianism’ has been applied to (or appropriated by), at various times, organisations associated with alchemy and speculative medicine; esoteric Christian societies; Freemasonry; and initiatory organisations

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including the Golden Dawn, the practices of which include speculative magic and hermetic philosophy. Ruin Frequently encountered in Gothic fiction, a ruin emblematises the collapse of order and, often, the residual presence (and lingering influence) of the past in the present. Ruins may be sublime in their fractured immensity. In this incarnation, they provide opportunities for the concealment of hostile opponents, and underline this through their spectacular chiaroscuro. They may likewise represent a haunted space populated by ghosts and other portentous supernatural intrusions from the past upon the present. In contrast to this, they may equally be utilised as a basic but safe refuge in a hostile environment, or may provide access – through subterranean chambers or other secret portals – to some concealed place or object. If a ruin is characteristically a building – the castle, the abbey and the convent are frequently encountered - its inhabitants may themselves exist in a relationship akin to a pathetic fallacy in which the desolation of space reciprocates the despair of self. Russian Gothic In common with Romanticism, European Gothic has exercised an influence upon Russian literature, though it is debatable how much of a discrete tradition of Russian Gothic may be said to exist. Certainly, Gothic elements are perceptible in the writings of such canonical authors as Alexander Pushkin (1799–1837) and Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821–81), though the fantastic implications found within some of the works of Nicolai Gogol (1809–52) in particular, would have held few attractions for a post-Revolutionary literary establishment preoccupied with socialist realism. That said, the recent scholarship of Muireann Maguire has convincingly identified Gothic elements in Sovietera Russian fiction, and her work forms an essential supplement to the established scholarship of Neil Cornwell, who for many years was the sole voice within Gothic criticism with sufficient authority to define the place of the genre in Russian letters. S Sabbat In current usage, a sabbat is a seasonal festival, observed in modern paganism and Wicca, and usually involving elements of feasting, dancing and celebration. The term is also used more loosely, however, to describe a gathering of witches for some ritual purpose, often with implications of Satanism and suggestions of orgiastic sexual behaviour.

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Sacraments The ceremonies liturgically observed by the Christian church are known as sacraments, though the exact number of rituals varies between the different sects that collectively make up Christianity. Roman Catholicism requires its adherents to participate in at least some of its seven canonical sacraments. These are, in a rough chronological order of likely succession: Baptism (in which a believer is named a member of the church and formally absolved of their earliest sins); Confirmation (which completes the act of Baptism by having the believer confirm their faith); Eucharist (also known as the Mass, in which the believer consumes ritual elements intimately associated, through transubstantiation, with Christ’s body and blood); Penance (in which absolution is granted by a priest within the confessional); Anointing (in which consecrated oils are ritually applied to the sick); Holy Orders (in which a layman is formally ordained into the priesthood); and Matrimony (which solemnises an essentially indissoluble state of marriage). Extreme Unction is an extension of Anointing: in this ceremony, consecrated oils are applied to the dying. Under Roman Catholic canon law, a priest may not marry. Protestantism recognises two sacraments only – Baptism and Holy Communion – though many Protestant denominations require a ceremony of Confirmation in which the believer affirms those promises made on his or her behalf by their sponsors in infant Baptism. Sadism Named after the Marquis de Sade (1740–1814) by the psychologist Leopold von Krafft-Ebing, sadism is a sexual preference in which pleasure is gained by inflicting physical suffering or mental humiliation upon others. San Francisco Gothic This term may be applied to the popular Industrial music and Goth subculture scene in contemporary San Francisco, though it is also a generic term for American Gothic fictions either set in or around the west-coast city or else written by authors domiciled there. The tradition was effectively initiated by Ambrose Bierce (1842–c.1914), and subsequent authors have exploited the countercultural and sexually fluid identities of the San Francisco Bay area. Contemporary San Francisco Gothic favours the vampire in particular: the Vampires of San Francisco series (2012–15) by Jessica McBrayer (dates not known), which is widely distributed through the Internet, is a representative example.

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Satan Despite being a fallen angel, popularly regarded as the archenemy of Christ and an alternative deity for those rejecting Christianity, Satan is a sparsely described figure in Judaeo-Christian scripture. He is, characteristically, a figure who tempts believers out of the way of righteousness (1 Chronicles 21:1), and though he fails to tempt Christ in the wilderness (Mark 1:13), it is Satan who enters into Judas and prompts him to betray his master (Luke 22:3). The popular image of Satan as bearded, clovenhooved and horned is almost certainly derived from the figure of Pan, and his association with a type of brooding nobility, akin to that of the Gothic Hero, was the poetic creation of John Milton (1608–74) rather than that of the translators of the King James Bible (1611). Satanism The ritualised worship of Satan and his attendant demons, and a religious practice quite distinct from paganism. Satanism is premised upon the Judaeo-Christian assumption that a binary demiurge exists in opposition to the Deity, and it thus functions essentially in reaction to the hegemony of a dominant religion. Schauerroman A component of German Gothic, published well into the nineteenth century, the Schauerroman or ‘shudder novel’ shared some of the characteristics of the Ritterroman and Räuberroman, whilst adding in the schauerlich element of the supernatural. Other commonly encountered components of the Schauerroman include vindictive banditti, the imperilled heroine (suggestive of Female Gothic) and exceptional male hero-villains (again, suggestive of the Gothic Hero of First-Wave Gothic). In German drama, the literary tradition inspired a Schauerdrama whose incidents were characteristically more excessive than those of melodrama. Science Fiction The tenor and preoccupations of science fiction owe much to Gothic. In a sense, the inflection of medicine with philosophy through Gothic in Frankenstein (1818) by Mary Shelley (1797–1851) establishes not merely a generic connection but also a commitment to profound ethical speculation that has persisted in what are frequently dismissed as popular or ephemeral forms of writing. Shelley, it should be noted, explored both a projected human future and a biological apocalypse in her later novel The Last Man (1826). Like Gothic, science fiction frequently explores the potential for both selfless altruism and selfish depravity in human motivations and relations, and this

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speculative quality is possibly as pervasive in the latter genre as the technological innovations that it frequently fetishises. While the speculative futures of science fiction have frequently been projected into virtual reality by way of cyberpunk, it is worth noting that the corresponding subgenre of steampunk, which imbricates technological innovation with the iconography of the (often Victorian) past, owes much to Gothic in its exploration of monstrosity. Scottish Gothic Though it might be superficially dismissed as a regional Gothic of British Gothic, Scottish Gothic has displayed the characteristics of a discrete national genre from its earliest days. Popularised beyond its own national borders by the supernatural and sublime elements of the poetry and novels of Sir Walter Scott (1771–1832), Scottish Gothic consistently evokes a landscape culturally and politically different from that of England. Initiated in the context of the sophisticated Scottish Enlightenment and an educated national taste for scholarly antiquarianism, early Gothic writings from, and about, Scotland drew heavily upon balladry and folklore, with the imagined pasts of both Ossianism and chivalry inflecting a nostalgia for a warlike past associated with nationalistic distinction. These early texts frequently invoked the sublimity and wildness of Highland scenery, and the marginal nature of the Scottish islands. In terms of its religious preoccupations, Scottish Gothic shares some of the sectarian impetus of Irish Gothic, although its specific critique of Roman Catholicism is comparatively muted. Indeed, Scottish Gothic generated what is most likely the most protracted interrogation of Protestantism through the genre, in The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824) by James Hogg (1770–1835). The country’s later tradition of urban Gothic was centred initially upon the labyrinth (and, indeed, doppelganger) geography of Edinburgh’s Old and New Towns, and subsequently upon the post-industrial and post-imperial ambience of Glasgow and the new towns. These latter works emphasise the cultural unease of the twentieth-century fin de siècle, and interrogate also the uneasy relationship between Scottish culture, alcohol and narcotics: the bleak social realism of the Scottish present, such as that depicted in Trainspotting (1993) by Irvine Welsh (1958–), is frequently inflected with Gothicised degeneration

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and violence. Scottish Gothic has experienced something of a renaissance within Gothic criticism, with the 1991 essay ‘Heart Lands: Contemporary Scottish Gothic’ by the pioneering British critic David Punter setting an enduring agenda that has most recently been revisited at length in a 2011 special issue of the academic journal Gothic Studies. Scrying The practice of divination by gazing into a black mirror or other opaque surface, sometimes known as a scrying glass. Séance This term popularly denotes those meetings in spiritualism which deploy mediumship to communicate with the dead. In the Victorian context, such sittings would normally be conducted in a private room, in semi-darkness, and with those gathered holding hands, usually around a table. The medium might communicate through a spirit guide, and relay putative messages from beyond the grave through a variety of voices. Music and unexplained noises might also be perceived by those present, this table-rapping being occasionally accompanied by the levitation of the table, the teleportation of small objects, and similar occult phenomena. The séance still exists as a practice in modern spiritualism, though much of the Victorian ambience of mystery has been discarded. The term ‘séance’ may also occasionally be encountered as a term to describe meetings conducted to demonstrate the claims of mesmerism and similar pseudosciences. Secret Societies In Gothic, secret societies are perceived as facilitating and perpetuating the presence of alternative codes of morality and loyalty within the society that encloses them. In this sense, secret societies implicitly question the power of organised society and its right to command the total loyalty of all citizens. Structured within the genre mostly in the form of brotherhoods – sororities are comparatively rare in fiction – secret societies arguably descend from four main focal points, associated with religious and social unease. Given the perceptible connection between First-Wave Gothic and Protestantism, one of these focal points is, naturally, Roman Catholicism. With the Inquisition and other clerical organisations such as the Jesuits (or Society of Jesus, founded 1540) customarily perceived as influential and powerful self-governing bodies which function within both church and society, Protestant suspicions of unaccountability and hidden agendas seem naturally to punctuate those narratives that explore the culture of Continental Catholicism

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or interrogate the influence of that religion within the home nation. The second focal point is that of resistance to the power of secular governance. Heavily influenced by the Räuberroman tradition of German Gothic, it fictionalises organisations of thieves or banditti, who operate under a systematic morality which places them at odds with the sometimes corrupt society which criminalises their actions and punishes their members. The obliquely political nature of criminality inflects the third focal point, that of revolutionary brotherhoods. Though the secret tribunals of the French Revolution and the Reign of Terror are a context here, depictions of this type also draw on popular perceptions of Freemasonry (or, alternatively, of the Rosicrucians), and explore – in the later nineteenth century in particular – the revolutionary activities of Italian political activists. The tradition is maintained in the twenty-first century by way of fictions that draw on conspiracy theories implicating, again, cabals of Freemasons or Roman Catholic organisations, within a secret world governance. The final focal point centres variously upon the occult and the supernatural. This category includes those organisations, real or imagined, which ostensibly attempt to change the course of world events through the practice of ritual magic (such as the Golden Dawn), and those defensive or offensive gatherings – in modern Gothic and Gothicised young adult fiction most notably – of hitherto solitary beings such as vampires and werewolves. These latter communities are essentially uncanny, given that their organisation frequently references the human family as its paradigm. Sensation Fiction A form of Victorian popular fiction, influenced by the stylistics of both Gothic and melodrama, characterised by narratives of mystery, crime and social or sexual scandal. Though the central role played by Wilkie Collins (1824–89) in the development of the genre cannot be overstated, it should be noted that sensation fiction was a genre which readily adapted itself to the expression of social issues by female authors. In this sense, the genre frequently led its readers into the contemplation of inequality within marriage, by way of plots which did not fear to address issues of inheritance, illegitimacy, adultery, bigamy and marital desertion. Indeed, the manner in which heroines coped with, rather than collapsing beneath, these situations underwrote sensation fiction as a subversive form of writing well

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aware of patriarchal power in the home specifically and society more broadly. Among the most successful female contributors to the genre are Mary E. Braddon (1835–1915) and Ellen – usually styled Mrs Henry – Wood (1814–87). The genre shares some of the preoccupations of the Female Gothic, and its perils are more often human than supernatural in origin. Sensibility A fashionable convention in the description of feeling and emotion in the eighteenth century, sensibility emphasised the importance of a sensitive (and on occasion, sentimental) response to people, situations and the environment. Sensibility was publicly manifested in such external signs as tears, blushes and sighs, and these indicated the extent to which the perceiver had responded emotionally (rather than merely rationally) to a situation which might be, variously, melancholic, sublime or picturesque. Though supposedly a natural and unfeigned condition, the presence of the sensible was somewhat theatrical in its public expression. In the Female Gothic, pensive heroines are frequently depicted displaying a sensible responsiveness to the expansive vistas outside the chambers in which they are frequently imprisoned, and their male counterparts likewise exhibit an empathy with both the landscape and the heroine in order to prove their worthiness in the eyes of both character and reader. Excessive sensibility came ultimately to be seen as self-indulgent, and was often mocked – witness the comic Gothic of Northanger Abbey (1818) by Jane Austen (1775–1817). Serial Gothic Works of Gothic fiction produced in episodes and published either in successive issues of a journal or else as discrete parts of a cumulative novel. Though the origin of the monthly journal as a forum for fiction lies in the eighteenth century, it was the nineteenth century that saw the self-contained story develop into the serial as a way of retaining readership. Characteristically, more than one story was published concurrently in the journal, so that the conclusion of one narrative occurred at the mid-point of another. Serial fictions, whether featured in a periodical or published in cumulative parts, were frequently published in volume form subsequently, in part for the benefit of the circulating libraries and to exploit a second market among those who had missed part or all of the initial publication. Servants As a convention in Gothic fiction, servants are frequently depicted as being fearfully superstitious, comically garrulous

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and invariably inclined to gossip incautiously. Through these conventions, they may function as a strategic tool to reveal seemingly inconsequential details that advance the plot or clarify some otherwise mysterious actions – details which may be utterly meaningless to the servant and, indeed, often to his or her employer also, but which have a relevance apparent to the reader. The relationship between servant and employer in Gothic fiction tends towards a rather class-conscious paternalism, the emotional excesses of the loyal servant being both forgiven and restrained by the maturity of the master or mistress – though in comic Gothic, the servant at times performs the role of a knowing and realistic counterpart of a hero or heroine too wrapped up in sensibility to see the cynicism of those around him or her. Sexton An individual employed to look after a church or churchyard. Characteristically, a sexton is responsible for digging and maintaining graves, tolling the church bell for funerals, and repairing the fabric of the church and its fixtures. The sexton’s role is secular, and though he – for sextons are usually male in fiction – may assist a priest in some of his duties, he is not in holy orders. Shilling A unit of pre-decimal currency, in use in the British Isles until 1971. The pre-decimal system was structured on a system which divided currency into pounds, shillings and pence. Twelve pennies made up a shilling; twenty shillings were the equivalent of a pound; one pound and one shilling was a guinea, this latter unit of currency having a largely ceremonial rather than practical function. Shilling Shocker A novel characterised by crime or violence, popular in Victorian Britain, more expansive than the penny dreadful, and conventionally purchased for the price of one shilling. Sin Eater In the folklore of rural Wales and the Welsh borderlands – and in some parts of the United States also – one who consumes bread at the bedside of a dying person in order to symbolically remove their sin and permit them an easy transition to heaven. Because they are in effect the repositories of the sins of a community, sin eaters are regarded as taboo and outcast, and they live in perpetual risk of themselves being condemned to Hell with the sins of many, should they die without discharging their cumulative burden onto another. The role of community sin eater, in consequence, was frequently passed down within a single family.

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Slasher Film A popular subgenre of Gothic film, characteristically featuring graphic violence, and often involving a serial-killing spree motivated by some past action. Among the other recurrent components are homicidal motivations prompted by madness and psychotic obsessional behaviour (rather than by rationality); depictions of scopophilia and stalking; an inclination to dwell visually on the torturing and killing of the body rather than on the final outcome that is death; an ambivalent supernatural presence; and the ultimate survival of, usually, but one of several protagonists – often female and nominally termed the final girl. Film and Gothic criticism largely concur that the genre was initiated with Halloween (1978), directed by John Carpenter (1948–), though earlier films – such as The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), directed by Tobe Hooper (1943–2017) – have been cited as antecedents. Slavery A relatively minor theme in European and British Gothic, slavery is central to American Gothic and to both colonial Gothic and postcolonial Gothic. In the British context, fictional depictions of slavery and slave-ownership should be understood as being intimately related to both a distaste for feudalism in the age of Enlightenment, and a fear of any rebellion by the oppressed that threatens to undermine conventional notions of the ownership of property generally. The slave is thus both, paradoxically, a noble savage to be pitied in his or her present state and a potential rebel whose actions, however justified, may ultimately deprive an imperial race of its material as well as sentient property. The slaveowner, however, is characteristically depicted as little more than a tyrant, and though a whole culture may be implicated in slavery through its consumption of sugar, the physical cruelty and abuse enacted in the name of profit are seldom excused in novelistic description. Slavery is more substantially explored in American Gothic, quite simply because the enduring presence of slaves in the United States functioned as a silent critique of the very principles of brotherhood and equality upon which the nation was historically founded. Slavery, with its attendant freighting of racism, informed the nineteenth-century Gothic – and Gothic-inflected – writings of, among others, Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–64), Hermann Melville (1819–91) and Edgar Allan Poe (1809–49). Its heritage, which includes political inequality, social deprivation and interracial mistrust, was explored more extensively in the

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twentieth century, with Southern Gothic particularly charting the physical and moral degeneration of former plantation-owning families as well as the rise of a fluid culture linking poor white and black communities. The rise of modern corporate culture, the centralisation of power and privilege away from poorer communities, and the indebtedness experienced by many members of all racial groups have implications for a new definition of modern slavery for the twenty-first century, based upon uncertain wages, the liminal status of the immigrant, and the semi-feudal power of employers. Small-Town Gothic Within American Gothic, that branch of the genre which depicts supernatural incidents in smaller conurbations. This backdrop is evocative. It is ostensibly less sinister than that of the urban Gothic, though in smaller towns it is less easy to be anonymous and move unnoticed. Small towns may, on the one hand, nostalgically reference a lost America of the past, but on the other hand they are frequently also places in which strangers are not welcome and where secrets – domestic violence, incest, murder and occult practices such as Satanism – are kept hidden by familial and community consensus. Such towns feature, notably, in both Southern Gothic and New England Gothic, where they function also as a locus for a perceived degeneration in both the physiological body and the morally inflected body politic. Soul In Christian theology, an intangible component of the self which is immortal and survives the death of the body, and which may at the Last Judgement be consigned to an eternity in either heaven or Hell. The term may be used figuratively to describe a personal identity (or character) separate from bodily characteristics. In the folklore of some rural communities, the sins accumulated by an individual soul may be transferred to that of another being through the actions of a sin eater, thereby preserving the first body from punishment at the hands of the Deity. Southern Gothic Within twentieth- and twenty-first-century American Gothic, Southern Gothic characteristically depicts scenes of personal, familial and social degeneration in the former slaveowning states. The term was first applied in criticism to the writings of William Faulkner (1897–1962), these being works that do not dwell on slavery itself but rather upon its aftermath: the collapse of the riches, social standing and culture of the white families and communities that once derived their wealth from

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slave-maintained plantations. Here, the crumbling and damp plantation house stands emblematically in the stead of the castellated ruin associated with European Gothic, though the secrets it may harbour – incest, madness, violence, sexual perversion, rape and murder – are historic Gothic preoccupations. Southern Gothic, through the works of Anne Rice (1941–) and Poppy Z. Brite (1967–) in particular, has in recent years found a ready association with vampire fiction, the city of New Orleans – with its cultural hybridity – featuring in many works of this type. Spectre Bridegroom A recurrent feature within the genre, the spectre bridegroom is derived from the European supernatural ballad and folklore traditions. The motif is premised upon an actual – or more often impending – act of infidelity on the part of an espoused woman who promises to be true and faithful to her intended husband whilst he is absent upon some matter of chivalry. The absent lover, though, is forgotten, or else presumed dead, and the woman either takes a lover or engages in a contract of marriage. The ghost of her original lover, though, returns to claim her on the point of her adultery or at the wedding feast, and characteristically bears her off to the grave – his actions being a testament of his fidelity up to and beyond death and a punishment for her inconstancy. His body is usually something of a memento mori, skeletonised but recognisable, a stark icon of horror rather than of love. The figure of the spectre bridegroom was popularised in both the Sturm und Drang of eighteenth-century German Gothic – the balladic ‘Leonore’ (1773) by Gottfried August Bürger (1747–94) is noteworthy – and in British First-Wave Gothic, where ‘Alonzo the Brave’ is embedded within The Monk (1796) by Matthew G. Lewis (1775–1818). Within American Gothic, ‘The Specter Bridegroom’ (1819–20) by Washington Irving (1783–1859) is an early example, though the return of the doppelganger sister in ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ (1839) by Edgar Allan Poe (1809–49) surely draws upon part of the cultural energy associated with the device. Spirit Photography The process of recording what are alleged to be the images of the spirits or ghosts of the dead upon lightsensitive materials such as photographic plates or film. Spirit photography was utilised on occasions as a lucrative sideline by exploitative and fraudulent mediums in both Europe and the US, with double-exposed negatives allowing the imposition of

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semi-transparent images upon otherwise conventional prints of the living. The technology was frequently explored in psychical investigation, and though the practice largely fell out of favour in the twentieth century, it has been revived in more recent psychic entertainment through attempts to capture the moving images of so-called spirit orbs via digital media. Spiritualism Though the organised and systematic body of practices and assumptions today known as spiritualism arose in the United States in the mid-nineteenth century, its antecedents may be traced back to at least the time of the Cock Lane Ghost in 1762, and the attempts made to communicate with the dead by way of knocks and raps at that time. The activities of the three Fox sisters in Rochester, New York, in 1848 inspired a curiosity not merely to communicate with the dead, but to verify the data received from such communications, that spread to England by 1852. Though the earliest messages ostensibly received from spirit entities were communicated aurally by way of a code (usually one knock for ‘yes’, two for ‘no’), later developments within the séance room saw the introduction of musical instruments (accordions were particularly popular), objects which could be moved or teleported by playful spirits, and the ostensible vocalising of the dead, frequently in familiar accents, by way of the medium’s own voice. Spirit lights often joined inexplicable sounds as manifestations within the darkened séance room, and other technological innovations – such as spirit photography – were on occasions produced alongside ectoplasm as visual evidence of the presence of, or possession by, the dead. Mediumship was, notably, a female-dominated profession at a time when women were seldom permitted to exercise influence within mainstream Christianity, and amateur mediums were often deployed on those occasions when spiritualism was practised as a domestic entertainment rather than as systematic divination by the dead. Despite enduring controversy that has on occasions seen spiritualist practice decried as, on the one hand, charlatanry and, on the other, Satanism, spiritualism has survived into the twenty-first century and now functions essentially as a church within a broadly interpreted Christian consciousness. Steampunk A late twentieth- and twenty-first-century phenomenon in fiction, art and fashion, steampunk imbricates historical (and usually Victorian) iconography with supposedly futuristic

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technology – though this latter is for the most part depicted as being cumbersome, steam-powered and structurally elaborate rather than merely functional. Though nominally an offshoot of science fiction, the subgenre is frequently inflected with Gothic atmosphere: urban Gothic settings redolent with chiaroscuro and resembling the labyrinth are commonly encountered, and elaborate technological apotropaics are often deployed to contain or counter supernatural beings such as the vampire. The subgenre is commonly considered to have been initiated following the alternative technological history of Victorian Britain proposed in the novel The Difference Engine (1990) by William Gibson (1948–) and Bruce Sterling (1954–). Stiletto A knife or dagger with a long and slender blade, tipped with a needle-like point. Like the poniard, it is a thrusting or stabbing weapon rather than a cutting implement. Strawberry Hill An elaborate fantasy house near Twickenham, remodelled and constructed by the author Horace Walpole (1717–97) between 1747 and 1776. Walpole remodelled a house originally known as Chopped Straw Hall into a stylised castle, adding towers, battlements and parapets derived from Gothic architecture to the exterior and applying elaborate plasterwork and panelling within. The concept and ambience of the building were integral to the author’s drafting of the first avowedly Gothic novel, The Castle of Otranto (1764; named as a ‘Gothic Story’ in the second edition of 1765), and its details inspired a revival in both Gothic as a fashion in architecture and chivalry as a fashion in manners. Strawberry Hill was extensively restored in the early twenty-first century and is now a museum, having formerly been part of the campus of an adjoining university college. Sturm und Drang A term associated with German Gothic, meaning ‘storm and stress’, Sturm und Drang was a phenomenon in the German literature of the late eighteenth century (nominally the early 1770s through to the mid-1780s). Somewhat hostile to the rational ideals of the Enlightenment, and thus a counterpart of British Romanticism, Sturm und Drang characteristically emphasised nature and feeling, and dwelled upon extreme emotions often through the depiction of the despair or heroism displayed in dangerous circumstances. Sturm und Drang influenced the Räuberroman and is a context for the extreme emotions and suicide depicted in the influential and popular Die Leiden

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des jungen Werthers (1774) by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832). Sublime As an aesthetic theory, the Sublime enjoys an antiquity that can be traced back to the work of Cassius Longinus (213–73 ce). The revival of interest in the eighteenth century, though, can be traced almost exclusively to the philosophy of Edmund Burke (1729–97), and specifically to his A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1757), this latter being arguably the most influential theoretical study of aesthetics in the period of British First-Wave Gothic. Burke draws a distinction between the sublime – which inspires awe in the perceiver – and the beautiful or picturesque, which merely please. The experience of awe is closely associated with the emotion of fear, which undermines the rational and thus elevates the mind to contemplate a world which is not wholly contained or comprehended by human thought and human power. The sublime thus inspires in its perceivers a new sense of relative insignificance, with a consciousness of the brevity of human life, the smallness of the human frame, and the puniness of human achievements when set against the immensity of nature. Sublime environments are, characteristically, immense and extensive: a mountain is sublime, as is an expansive ocean, an empty desert, a vertiginous chasm or a deep waterfall. Obscurity is, likewise, sublime, for the very nature of darkness challenges the Enlightenment aspiration to comprehensively perceive and understand. The conceptuality of the sublime is not confined to nature in its application, however. Amongst human structures, the cyclopean and monumental partake of Sublime energies, and when displayed as a ruin point the perceiver to a contemplation, again, of the brevity of mortal life and the frailty of human achievement. Figuratively, the Sublime may be applied to human character as well as to buildings. The Gothic Hero, who is emotionally and aspirationally a figure of excess, may well be a moral and physical ruin because of his past life, and as such he may garner to himself those Aristotelian associations of pity and fear whose presence associate him with tragedy: his brooding presence is, likewise, calculated to inspire awe in the perceiver. Succubus A female demon who has sexual intercourse with sleeping men. The male equivalent is an incubus.

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Suicide The act of self-murder or ending one’s own life by artificial means is both illegal and taboo in many religious and secular traditions. A suicide may be seen in religious culture as usurping the power of the presiding deity over life and death, and in the secular world as evading the power of law and medicine to prolong or end existence. In folklore, suicides have been historically associated with the uneasy dead, returning variously as ghosts or vampires to torment or predate upon those among whom they formerly lived, or else finding their own corner in Hell. In common with the vampire, suicides in Europe were frequently buried face down at crossroads, and on occasions with a stake driven through the heart to hold the body in its grave. Supernatural Meaning, literally, that which is above (or beyond) the natural, this term is characteristically employed to describe anything that is seemingly occult or otherwise inexplicable. The term deserves, however, a more nuanced application, for its implications are that the ‘natural’ represents only that which is currently known, so that every manifestation of the supernatural demands an adjustment of knowledge to accommodate the novelty. The supernatural thus represents a moving and anxious boundary between the known and the unknown, between that which is accepted as fact and that which is superstition or supposition, between science and pseudoscience. Suspended Animation The preservation of a dead – or on occasion, live but comatose – body through artificial means until such time as it may be successfully reanimated. Relatively common as a plot device in science fiction, the place of suspended animation in Gothic is normally associated with instances of catalepsy or premature burial. The mummy, though a figure steeped in magic and mythology, draws on some of the cultural energy associated with suspended animation – as well as on the fear of being revived in a world which is at best culturally uncanny and at worst unrecognisable. T Table-Rapping In Victorian spiritualism particularly, alleged messages from the dead were transmitted by a series of knocks or raps upon the table around which the sitters were gathered. As the sitters characteristically held hands in a spiritualist séance, these raps were claimed as having a supernatural origin – though fake

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mediumship was frequently exposed, the raps being explained as being made with some mechanical device or else by a confederate. As the nineteenth century progressed, ‘table-rapping’ (or, on occasions, ‘table-turning’) became an often derogatory term applied to spiritualism as a whole, rather than merely to the communicative noises made upon the table itself. Taboo Derived from a Polynesian word (sometimes spelt ‘tabu’) which was applied to those things set apart from ordinary life and held as sacred, this term was utilised in psychoanalysis to signify the forbidden and effectively contagious nature of certain objects, substances or individuals. That which is designated taboo is fearful, and to touch it is to become taboo oneself. Having thus become taboo, one may only be readmitted to the community by undertaking certain ritual actions (such as washing or some other purification) or else utilising some apotropaic. In psychoanalysis, most secretions of the body have a taboo resonance, their abjection prompting a fear of the body from which they are abjected, a fear the secretion itself and a corresponding fear of those who might come into contact with both. Blood is, perhaps, the most striking of taboo secretions, being subject to prohibitions in Judaism (Genesis 9:4; Leviticus 17:12–14), Christianity (Acts 15:29), Islam (in the Quran, al-An’aam 6:145) and many other religions. In Gothic criticism, the vampire is often singled out as an exemplar of taboo, for it consumes a forbidden substance, and conventionally makes those whom it predates upon into vampires themselves, perpetuating its own exclusion from the blood-fearing community. Taper A wax candle, usually thin and elongated, and originally used for devotional purposes in Christian worship. The limited light produced by a taper, and its tendency to flicker and be suddenly extinguished by draughts, have ensured its enduring popularity as a fitful source of illumination in Gothic literature. Its guttering flame characteristically produces moving shadows, which suggest the presence of ghosts concealed within the chiaroscuro of the dungeons, subterranean passages and darkened, unfamiliar rooms in which the imperilled heroines of Female Gothic, in particular, must rely upon the uncertain light of a taper to guide them. There is a convention that, when a ghost is present or a haunting is imminent, a taper will become ‘sickly’ (that is, less bright) and finally burn with a blue flame.

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Tarot A method of divination through the use of playing cards. The tarot deck, which originated in Italy in the fourteenth century, consists of a Major Arcana of twenty-two cards, each of which depicts a symbolic figure, quality or event; and a Minor Arcana of fifty-six cards, divided into four suits: Swords, Wands, Pentacles and Cups. Many of the images of the Major Arcana – most notably The Fool, The Hanged Man and Death – have passed into common iconography, being familiar even to those who have never practised cartomancy, or divination through playing cards. A bespoke tarot deck was produced for the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn in 1910. Telekinesis A phenomenon frequently featured in fictional descriptions of psychical research, telekinesis is the supposed ability of an individual to teleport or move an object from one place to another by mental effort or supernatural power. Telepathy Coined by F. W. H. Myers (1843–1901) in 1882 as a term in psychical research, telepathy describes the alleged communication of words or mental images from one mind to another. The concept, it should be noted, precedes this neologism: thought transference and clairvoyance were investigated through mesmerism much earlier in the nineteenth century. Televisual Gothic Televised images were first demonstrated between 1926 and 1931 by the Scottish electrical engineer John Logie Baird (1888–1946), with geographically limited television networks being established in Britain and the US during the 1930s. Because of content limitations premised upon formal censorship and the informal restraints associated with taste, Gothic did not gain substantial access to television networks until the 1960s. The earliest televisual programming within the genre originated in the US, was serial in nature, and tended towards the comic Gothic: comedies such as The Munsters (1964–6) and The Addams Family (1964–6) were distributed internationally, where the more serious soap opera Dark Shadows (1966–71) enjoyed comparatively little currency outside of America. Comedic televisual Gothic relied heavily upon the viewer’s knowledge of Gothic iconography, stock characters and clichés, and at its best approached the stylistic self-consciousness of metafiction. Despite the Gothic inflection of a proportion of home-produced televisual dramas, British broadcasting did not produce a substantial and coherent serial Gothic work until 1977 and the

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BBC collection Supernatural, though the state broadcaster had between 1971 and 1978 produced single-episode dramas based upon, most notably, the work of M. R. James (1862–1936) and Charles Dickens (1812–70) under the title of ‘A Ghost Story for Christmas’. Hammer House of Horror, a collection of separate stories produced in association with Hammer films, the source of Hammer horror, was broadcast on the British commercial network ITV in 1980. The dominance of broadcasting by cable television from the 1990s has re-energised the Gothic content of television in both Europe and the US. As well as an innovative and spectacular tradition of psychic entertainment, episodic series such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997–2003) and Angel (1999–2004), and more extensive dramas such as Supernatural (2005–) and zombie drama The Walking Dead (2010–), have been syndicated worldwide, and have made considerable use of modern technology and special effects to encourage and maintain viewer loyalty. Terror The intellectually and artistically superior counterpart of horror in ‘On the Supernatural in Poetry’ (1826), a posthumous, post-Burkean study of sublime aesthetics by the First-Wave Gothic novelist Ann Radcliffe (1764–1823). Terror is subtle and suggestive, and prompts the mind to invest the restricted access to the fearful provided by the limited details within a fictional text with a more personal and imaginative significance. An author of terror effectively withholds perception, concealing the fearful in obscurity, or partially revealing it through chiaroscuro, conveying its presence by sound rather than vision, by implication rather than actualisation. The suggestive non-vision is characteristically protracted, generating suspense and uncertainty, and deferring the consummation or revelation till later in the text. Terror is, specifically, associated with Female Gothic, and with the protracted imperilling of the heroine: it is part of her gendered resilience that, though she may on occasions faint, she is seldom damaged intellectually by her ordeal. Terror may thus be a didactic as well as an uplifting experience, an ordeal that proves the heroine to be far more than a secondary character to be patronisingly rescued by male chivalry. Thanatos In Freudian psychoanalysis, the death instinct and the counterpart of Eros, the life instinct. The conflict between Eros (which embodies the powerful motivations of sexuality) and

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Thanatos (which tends to both destruction and, specifically, selfdestruction) is regarded in psychoanalysis as a source of anxiety, ambivalence and guilt. Beyond psychoanalysis, a thanatologist is one who studies dead animals (though the term was also briefly applied in a professional context to funeral directors in the 1970s and 1980s). Tourist Gothic That aspect of the genre which concerns itself with travelling in nominally marginal environments, tourist Gothic is a close associate of regional Gothic, the main demarcation being that the plots of the former revolve around travellers who are unfamiliar with the terrain into which they have journeyed. The classic geographical locations of tourist Gothic lie at the margins of familiar countries, and are for the most part rural or semi-rural. The traveller characteristically arrives there by rail or motor coach, and is frequently engaged upon a walking or cycling holiday rather than a business trip. The tourist is frequently disorientated within the environment – ambivalent signage, deliberate misdirection by a local person or sheer bad luck will divert him or her into an even more obscure place within the unknown: a house, village or other communal space that is uncanny in its slight resemblance to the known, but alien with regard to its customs, worship or inhabitants. The tourist may ultimately escape (probably learning a few valuable lessons in the process), or more likely will be retained or absorbed – socially, or perhaps through cannibalism – into the body of the community. In the latter case, little evidence usually remains to direct outsiders to the ‘lost’ individual – or to warn others not to take the same path. Transubstantiation Within the doctrines of Roman Catholicism, transubstantiation is that mystical process integral to the sacrament of the Mass (or Holy Communion) whereby the consecrated elements of bread and wine become literally (rather than symbolically) the body and blood of Christ. The doctrine of the real presence of Christ within the two elements of the sacrament (which, after consecration, retain only their outward appearance as conventional organic substances) is an ancient one, and can be traced to at least the ninth century ce. Historically, Protestantism has viewed transubstantiation as theologically suspect: within the Thirty-Nine Articles which govern the Church of England, the transubstantiate Mass is described as ‘a

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blasphemous fable and a dangerous deceit’ (Article 31). In the Protestant tradition, the Eucharist is characteristically consubstantiate, meaning that the consecrated elements are spiritually invested but not substantially changed. U Uncanny In Gothic criticism, this term customarily references that psychoanalytical concept which locates fear in the space between the familiar and the unfamiliar. In the essay ‘Das Unheimliche’ (1919), Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) distinguishes between the Heimlich (the ‘homely’) and the Unheimlich (the ‘unhomely’, but usually translated from German as ‘the uncanny’). The Unheimlich may induce fear simply because it is not familiar to the perceiver, though Freud asserts that there is an Unheimlich element with even the most familiar places, persons or concepts. In this sense, fear may arise when some small detail of a familiar thing or person is missing or has changed almost imperceptibly; when a customary or established pattern of behaviour is not observed; or where rational absolutes are departed from due to some seemingly supernatural intervention. Classic focal points for the uncanny include ostensibly familiar spaces rendered strange and labyrinth-like due to darkness or chiaroscuro; the customary rites of Christian sacraments transformed into the ceremonies of Satanism; and the presence of unprecedented or occult phenomena in otherwise unexceptional locations. The human body, which counterpoints a familiar external outline with interior workings obscured by skin and flesh, is likewise a locus for uncanny unease. Injury, excretion and abjection are all reminders of the fragility of human life and the permeability of corporeal boundaries. The conventional body’s association with the shape and nature of ab-human and post-human entities – vampires, zombies and werewolves particularly – likewise compromises the epistemological understanding of the known and the familiar, and implicitly prompts questions regarding the definition and integrity of the self. Upas Tree The upas tree is an actual plant, native to Java, which exudes a poisonous sap. It is occasionally encountered in colonial Gothic, often far beyond its geographical origins, as an exotic and deadly growth that emits a fatal miasma. It is occasionally deployed metaphorically in postcolonial Gothic.

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Urban Gothic That branch of the genre in which either narratives are located primarily within cityscapes, or the description of the built environment is inflected with characteristic Gothic imagery. Urban narratives within the genre are associated overwhelmingly with Victorian Gothic and its successors: though cities frequently feature in First-Wave Gothic, they tend to form a sporadic backdrop for narratives which are either conducted within significant inner spaces – such as the family home, or closed institutions such as the abbey or the Inquisition – or see characters (particularly the heroines of Female Gothic) abducted from these spaces across open country to some distant place of incarceration. In later urban Gothic, though, the city is itself the place of metaphorical as well as literal imprisonment – and its labyrinth of buildings, the complexity of its geography and the tendency of its streets to conceal rather than reveal their inhabitants all serve to disorientate the fictional perceiver. Despite the supposed anonymity of heavily populated conurbations, the city is characteristically an environment drenched in scopophilia: it is the natural terrain of the flâneur, the haunt of thieves and confidence men, and the chosen space of the opportunist in all criminal guises. All of this, of course, runs contrary to the way in which the planned and ordered city was envisaged as an icon of Enlightenment progress. The eighteenth-century remodelling of many cities upon a grid-like model of straight streets, squares and crescents – as in the New Town of Edinburgh – drove less wealthy citizens into the residual and densely populated rookeries that preserved in many cases a much older street plan. In cities where this was the case – Edinburgh and London particularly, in a British context – the city developed a doppelganger identity, with the pre-Enlightenment portion coming to represent a more primitive and less controllable aspect of urban living. Victorian social exploration presented such locations as spectacular and colourful even when perceptibly dangerous, and their hybridising of the known and unknown, the contemporary and the historical, rendered them truly uncanny. The apparent unknowability of the urban environment, its opacity in the eyes of the outsider, and its ability to preserve seemingly anachronistic morals, manners and practices persist in contemporary depictions of the urban, Gothic now being a widely accepted mode through which to explore human and architectural monstrosity.

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V Vampire The word ‘vampire’ entered the English language in 1745, as a description of a dead body, animated by an evil spirit, which returned from the grave at night to suck the blood of the living. This definition was influenced by European reports of alleged vampire epidemics in early eighteenth-century Silesia, and it is these reports that first establish how vampires reproduce their kind, how they may be contained by apotropaics and how they might most effectively be neutralised. First entering European literature by way of German poetry in the mid-eighteenth century, the vampire, now transformed from a decomposing peasant to an urbane aristocrat, entered British prose fiction by way of The Vampyre (1819) by John Polidori (1795–1821). Polidori’s work stabilised the form, and its configuration of the un-dead as an isolato, whose morally suspect presence infected others, aligned the vampire closely with the Gothic Hero. Perhaps most significantly, Polidori’s work endowed the vampire with an ambivalent sexuality – part seducer, part rapist; heterosexual yet ambivalently homosocial, the vampire came to stand for repressed and taboo sexualities – an enduring aspect of its textuality which Gothic criticism has stressed often to the neglect of other implications. The persistent critical concentration upon ‘Carmilla’ (1871–2) by J. Sheridan Le Fanu (1814–73) and Dracula (1897) by Bram Stoker (1847–1912) has arguably perpetuated the dominance of the sexual imperative, though criticism has come to recognise that the vampire, and its association with the quality and plenitude of blood, may well stand for many other things. Among the most significant critical approaches that may be applied to vampire texts are those premised upon gender (where vampirism effectively ‘frees’ women to be self-determinedly sexual); upon empire, where colonial Gothic and imperial Gothic utilise the vampire as an icon of the reverse colonisation of the currently hegemonic power; upon medicine, where the depletion of blood may be comprehended as a conventional pathological event; and upon psychoanalysis, in which the vampire evocatively emblematises repression, taboo and abjection. The twentieth- and twenty-first-century vampire is less likely to be European than American. This geographical transition may be a consequence of historical US dominance in cinema, where the

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vampire holds an enduring popularity parallel to its presence in televisual Gothic. The American vampire should be understood as a species discrete from its European antecedents, even where it recalls their clichés in metafiction. Under the influence of Anne Rice (1941–) and Poppy Z. Brite (1967–) particularly, the introspective and besieged vampire has attained a significant place in queer Gothic in the age of AIDS, an achievement which may be related to those most recent developments which depict the undead in a battle for cultural integrity against, variously, others of their own kind, werewolves and unsympathetic mortals. Vegetarianism To adopt a vegetarian diet is to implicitly reject the violence associated with the carnivore lifestyle, and it is noteworthy that vegetarians have featured sporadically in the genre from First-Wave Gothic to near-contemporary fictions. In Frankenstein (1818) by Mary Shelley (1797–1851), for example, the Creature’s innocent, noble savage status is underwritten by his eschewing of meat in favour of berries. More recently, some vampire fictions have advanced the consumption of synthetic (or at least medically extracted) blood as an alternative to that which is taken through the interventive violence of the bite. Vespers In the monasticism of the Roman Catholic church, Vespers is a religious service that takes place in the evening, ostensibly at the hour closest to sunset but conventionally at 1800 hours. It is part of a liturgical series, or breviary, of services which begins with Matins (at midnight); Lauds (at dawn, or 0300 hours); Prime (at 0600 hours); Terce (at 0900 hours); Sext (midday); Nones (at 1500 hours); Vespers; and Compline (at 2100 hours). Victorian Gothic Strictly speaking, a text should be considered Victorian if it is produced in the period between the formal accession to the throne of Queen Victoria (1819–1901) in 1837 and her death in 1901. In practice, the popular application of the term is somewhat vaguer, and it often encompasses an effective ‘long nineteenth century’ that precedes Victoria’s reign and extends well into that of Edward VII. For the sake of accuracy, though, the Victorian period should be regarded as being bound by the specific dates of the queen’s reign. Vivisection The practice of medical experimentation upon living (and often unanaesthetised) animals is closely policed in the modern world. In earlier centuries, though, such experimentation was regarded as a conventional component of any education in

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medicine. A growing sense of public outrage at the needless suffering of animals in Britain resulted not merely in the regulation of vivisection, but also in the demonisation of vivisectors themselves. Though the title character of Frankenstein (1818) by Mary Shelley (1797–1851) precedes the popular Victorian campaigns against animal experimentation, his practice does suggest the casual approach to life associated with some medical professionals, and it is notable that Shelley’s protagonist obtains at least some of his materials from slaughterhouses rather than graveyards. In later Gothic, vivisection is extended to the human subject – to the body in Heart and Science (1882–3) by Wilkie Collins (1824–89); to the mind in Dracula (1897) by Bram Stoker (1847–1912); and to a hybridity bridging the human and the bestial in The Island of Dr Moreau (1896) by H. G. Wells (1866–1946). Voodoo Sometimes spelt ‘voudoo’ or ‘vodou’, voodoo is a popular form of religion which draws upon African spirituality and is often imbricated with elements of Christianity. It is practised in various forms in those territories once associated with colonial slavery, including the West Indies, Haiti and parts of the southern United States. Historically, voodoo often functioned as a focus for resistance against the culture of the ascendant commercial or imperial power. Voodoo quite naturally has a place in colonial Gothic and postcolonial Gothic, though it is frequently encountered also in Southern Gothic, where its rites, ceremonies and apotropaics – many of which have historically been condemned as witchcraft – are frequently depicted in cross-cultural centres such as New Orleans. W Wake A vigil, usually undertaken by family and close friends, around a dead body on the night (and sometimes the day also) preceding its interment. Though an occasion for prayers as well as reflection, especially within the traditions of Roman Catholicism, the wake served the practical purpose of ensuring that the body was actually dead and that the risk of premature burial was minimised. Wandering Jew In Christian folklore, a bystander at the time of the Crucifixion, placed under a curse by Christ as a punishment for mocking Him whilst carrying the Cross. The curse condemns

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the Wandering Jew to tarry on earth until Christ’s return. This mythological figure has been allocated a number of names following his apparent advent in the thirteenth century, including Cartaphilus and Ahasuerus, though he is usually denominated simply as the Wandering Jew. His status aligns him with the isolato and the Gothic Hero, though his evident penitence distances him from that other eternally condemned figure of Christianity, Satan. The Wandering Jew is a sporadic presence in Gothic, being fictionalised by the Polish author Jan Potocki (1761–1815), the French Gothic writer Eugène Sue (1804–57) and the Irish Gothic writer Charles Robert Maturin (1780–1824). Warlock A male witch or practitioner of magic. The term ‘warlock’ is popularly used to signify a practitioner of maleficent or black magic, and is seldom used in Wicca. Weird Tales A popular American magazine, published between 1923 and 1954, and instrumental in advancing the stylistics of both American Gothic and science fiction in the first half of the twentieth century. Weird Tales was noteworthy for its instrumental role in popularising the writings of several significant twentiethcentury authors of fantasy and horror including, most notably, H. P. Lovecraft (1890–1937), Robert Bloch (1917–94), Robert E. Howard (1906–36) and Ray Bradbury (1920–2012). Welsh Gothic One of the four most substantial regional Gothic traditions of British Gothic, Welsh Gothic none the less remains somewhat less known than its English, Irish and Scottish counterparts. The small corpus of generically Welsh Gothic can be divided into two main categories: fictions which utilise the Principality as a location; and those works which are written by Welsh authors, irrespective of the geographical locations they portray. In the case of the former, Wales has been fictionalised as both a wild and a marginal territory by writers as diverse as J. Sheridan Le Fanu (1814–73), Algernon Blackwood (1869– 1951) and L. T. C. Rolt (1910–74). In the case of the latter, the critic Jane Aaron has identified a credible twentieth-century tradition of site-specific textuality amongst anglophone Welsh writers which utilises elements derived from demotic folklore, such as the sin eater. Though academic criticism of Gothic fiction written out of Wales has often stressed the work of Arthur Machen (1863–1947) to the exclusion of less-known authors,

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the recent tranche of publication by Welsh presses of Gothic works by Welsh-born authors as well as writers domiciled in Wales suggests that a redrawing of the landmarks of this national Gothic is now due. Works such as Sugar Hall (2014) by Tiffany Murray (1973–) and the edited ghost story collection A Flock of Shadows (2014) will no doubt inform the coming debate regarding national as well as generic aesthetics. Wendigo A supernatural creature from Native American mythology, associated with the abduction of travellers in the wilderness and on occasions with acts of cannibalism. The wendigo enjoys a sporadic presence in twentieth-century Gothic, where its implications are associated with the hostile environments of ecogothic. The most prominent works to feature the wendigo are a short story by the same name, published in 1910 by Algernon Blackwood (1869–1951), and the novel Pet Sematary (1983) by Stephen King (1947–). Werewolf Lycanthropy – the shape-shifting process by which a human being is transformed into a wolf – has a demonstrable folkloric history of considerable antiquity. It asserts the possibility that a residual savagery dwells within even the most civilised individual, and that that quality may on occasions be released through an involuntary transformation. Though there are occasional suggestions in both folklore and fiction that one may become a werewolf after having been attacked by one, it is probably more frequently intimated that werewolves are born of a mixed marriage between a werewolf and a conventional human being. Traditionally, such offspring shifted into vulpine guise either at night generally or specifically at the rise of a full moon. Like the vampire, the werewolf is vulnerable to certain apotropaics, and the usual convention is that it can only be killed by a silver bullet, sometimes marked with the sign of the Cross. On being killed, the wolf characteristically resumes its human form, often being found naked and obviously mutilated where the bullet has entered the ostensible beast’s hide. There is a credible body of lycanthropic fiction within the Gothic canon, Hugues the Werewolf (1838) by Sutherland Menzies (1808–76) being an early example. Later works, such as The Werewolf of Paris (1934) by Guy Endore (1900–70), utilise the language of degeneration to depict sexual deviance in vulpine terms. In psychoanalytic terms,

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the werewolf (and its equivalent in the fairy-tale world) conventionally emblematises implication in sexuality, a theme developed particularly by Angela Carter (1940–92) in The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories (1979). Most recently – by way of the Twilight series by Stephenie Meyer (1973–), amongst other works – the werewolf has been depicted as a parallel supernatural species to the vampire, dwelling undetected alongside both vampires and mortals in a modern milieu, and seeking to pursue its vulpine lifestyle without drawing attention to its innate Otherness. Wertherism A fashionable type of morbid sentimentality on the part of young men at the eighteenth-century fin de siècle. Taking a lead from the eponymous hero of Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (1774) by Johan Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832), those who embraced Wertherism affected the distinctive dress – a blue jacket and yellow waistcoat – of Goethe’s sentimental hero, imitated his sensibility and introspection and, on occasion, took the imitation so far as the act of suicide which terminated the eponymous character’s sorrows. White Magic That branch of magic that is exercised for beneficent purposes. Wicca The practices of modern witchcraft, rather than those of the earlier witch. Contemporary Wicca is perceptibly more closely aligned with religious paganism than to historical and fictional portrayals of witches in western culture: though the noun ‘witch’ is on occasions still deployed in pagan circles, it has been eclipsed progressively by ‘Wiccan’, this being a term less associated with both Christianity and Satanism and one which distinguishes contemporary practical magic from its historical and fictional counterparts. Wilderness That geographical space that is beyond both the urban and the cultivated countryside. In Gothic, the wilderness may embody any number of a range of frequently conflicting significations and implications. These include excessive, untamed and uncontainable fertility or its complete opposite in terms of a sustaining or viable environment; being the abode of savage or degenerate human cultures or, by contrast, the refuge of the innocence of the noble savage; the domain of predatory animals, or else a metaphorical ark in which gentle nature might be preserved from the projected apocalypse of the Anthropocene. The wilderness is, inevitably, a popular motif for the

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cultural purposes of ecogothic, and has a specific relevance to both Canadian Gothic and American Gothic, as well as a function in apocalyptic science fiction. Witch A practitioner of magic, often female and usually in a historical or literary context: adherents of modern Wicca customarily refer to such practitioners as Wiccans. Witchcraft is not necessarily Satanism, though prejudice and popular imagery often connect the two. Many of the clichés that have come to popularly typify the witch have a basis in ritual magical practice: the besom or broom was utilised, for example, to clear the ritual space, the cauldron was used to prepare organic products for what was essentially a form of herbalism, and the cat functioned as a silent guardian and witness. The specific gendering of witches as women – for male witches were often denominated, or else named themselves, as warlocks or wizards – intimates that witchcraft may have been, like later spiritualistic mediumship, one of those rare spaces in which women might set the agenda and maintain a gendered exclusivity for their practice. The activities of the witch adjoined those of the midwife and wise woman in a form of demotic medicine, unregulated by patriarchy: witches prepared ointments to salve inflammations and ease pain, made drinks to relieve neuralgia and the stress of childbirth, eased problems in children – and on occasions terminated pregnancies at the request of expectant mothers, in contradiction of Christianity’s theological prerogative regarding life and death. With such perceived power, however local it may have been, it was scarcely surprising that these figures, who lived on the margins of the community, were historically persecuted by church and state alike. Witch Trials Any of the legal hearings, often conducted by an allmale juridical court and without recourse to legal representation for the accused, in which a witch or witches were tried either for their beliefs or else for the practice of magic. Among the most famous are those of the Pendle Witches in Lancashire in 1612, and the Salem Witch Trials of 1692 in Massachusetts. Such trials were usually punctuated by dramatic revelations of sexual transgression and doctrinal nonconformity, the behaviour of women being especially scrutinised in an ostensible search for evidence of the presence of Satan within the

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community. In Britain, practitioners of magic (as well as those practising mediumship for financial gain) were restricted by the 1735 Witchcraft Act, which was repealed only in 1951. It was replaced by the Fraudulent Mediums Act of 1951, which was itself repealed in 2008. Wolfsbane Sometimes spelt wolf’s bane, and known colloquially as monkshood, this is a highly poisonous plant historically used in the preparation of salves by witches. In European folklore, and in literature derived from that folklore, wolfsbane is occasionally used as an apotropaic against werewolves and vampires. It is deployed in modern homeopathy under the name of aconite or aconitum. X X Certificate A cinema classification formerly utilised by the British Board of Film Censors to legally restrict the viewing of a film to those who are legally defined as adults. Historically, the age at which a citizen of the United Kingdom was legally designated an adult was 21 years: the age of majority was lowered to 18 years in 1975. X certificates – which were replaced by the 18 certificate in 1982 – were allocated to any film with a significant sexual or horror content. In the specific case of Hammer horror, the invariable imposition of an X certificate by the Censor upon any Gothic film almost certainly prompted that production house to enhance the erotic content of the work through nudity and scenes of a sexual nature, thus effectively opening up the work to two adult markets. Y Yew A highly poisonous coniferous tree, traditionally associated in Europe with cemeteries and graveyards, where its evergreen foliage symbolises eternal life and victory over death. Young Adult Fiction Alternatively known as YA fiction or teen fiction, this expanding branch of the literary market has embraced Gothic with enthusiasm. YA fiction draws many of its paradigms from its adult equivalent, but stresses those issues that particularly appeal to readers placed anywhere between high school and undergraduate level. There is a characteristic emphasis on the exploration of personal identity, sexuality and community, and these are

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often channelled through the experiences of witches, vampires and werewolves portrayed as living among conventional mortals. There is much here that draws upon small-town Gothic, and even more that discusses the oppressive and sometimes violent culture of school and home. The genre remains surprisingly popular amongst undergraduates, perhaps because of the frequency with which teen fiction is translated successfully – and with an enhanced maturity – into Gothic film. Z Zombie Originally a lumbering and passive figure bound up with slavery, voodoo and the repressive plantation culture of the West Indies, the zombie has evolved in recent years into a fast-moving killer whose bite is as infectious as that of a vampire. The original zombie was either a corpse revived from its grave and forced by magic to work in the plantation fields, or else an entranced living body subjected to a similar servitude. Such figures were popularised in early American cinema, with films such as White Zombie (1932) hinting at sexual exploitation through mesmerism in an environment redolent with racism and interracial suspicion. It was the cinematic work of George A. Romero (1940–2017) that initiated the drift of the zombie from its colonial Gothic roots and into the purlieu of urban Gothic. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968) was distinguished by its (for the time) graphic violence, and its critique of racism, particularly in its closing moments, is a tour de force. If the zombies in Night of the Living Dead were menacing but seemingly so diffident as to be dangerous only at close quarters, Romero’s later revisions of the zombie theme progressively accelerate the living dead into sure-footed flesh-eaters capable of collectively mobbing a living victim and reducing him or her to little more than a mess of discarded tissue. Zombies, in this context, are mindless but purposeful, and their ruthless individualism in pursuit of sustenance can only be countered by collective thought and action, aided by the occasional deployment of technology and firearms. The zombie apocalypse seems always to demand the presence of a residual and resistant humanity, a small group gathered together and representing both sexes, several races and a spread of ages

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and abilities, the raw materials as it were for a new society, should this microcosm of the west survive. Subsequent revisitings of the zombie theme in televisual Gothic – most notably The Walking Dead (2010–), a serial Gothic work based upon a graphic novel – have emphasised the positive function of community values, even where the community may be as threatened by dissent within as much as degeneration without.

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Theories of Gothic

Colonial and Postcolonial Gothic Given the justifiable hostility and cultural Otherness of those indigenous peoples whose lives were significantly disrupted by imperial intervention, it is hardly surprising that Gothic was historically a favoured generic vehicle through which the colonial experience might be interrogated and expressed. Through Gothic images of monstrosity, subaltern territories and peoples could be satisfactorily Othered, and colonialist rationality and civilisation demonstrated in all their reasonable superiority – though, as writings from the most significant period of systematic imperial expansion, the nineteenth century, suggest, the hegemony of imperial power was often less than competent to deal with unprecedented phenomena. Hence, the tools by which empire is customarily constructed – Christian religion, rational epistemology, military technology and regulated capitalism – are often demonstrably subverted or defeated by beliefs and beings whose persistence proclaims the limits of imperial culture. Gothic, quite simply, is a way in which the unease of empire may be expressed from within an imperial culture. In Gothic criticism, the imperial experience has been dominated – for better or for worse – by the writings of British authors, and a particular emphasis has been placed in the study of these writers upon India at the expense of Egypt, Asia and Africa. This is hardly surprising. Great Britain was arguably the most openly expansive imperial power of the nineteenth century, and the most culturally imperial through its imposition of language and institutions upon subaltern territories. It is important to recognise, though, that theories of imperial Gothic may be applied with equal validity to other colonialist regimes – specifically in how these commentating cultures variously claim ascendancy over, or else find their interventions successfully resisted

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by, indigenous peoples. Hence, that phase of American Gothic which charts early encounters between Europeans and indigenous Americans might justifiably be deployed as a relevant illustration of the colonial Gothic imperative, rather than being viewed as merely a developmental phase of a broader national (and expatriate European-dominated) genre. The imperial experience of non-anglophone nations should, likewise, not be casually ignored. If Gothic has been deployed historically as a medium through which the subaltern Other may be demonised, its function in the postcolonial world has become very much that of a prism through which the aftermath of empire might be viewed. There is more to this than a simplistic demonisation of former colonial powers, or a rationalising of colonist hegemony through feudal analogies. Postcolonial Gothic deals with what is, without doubt, a far more complex cultural interface associated not merely with the contemporary situation but with the memory of the past and, significantly, the historical collusion of subject peoples in their own repression. Postcolonial Gothic is implicated in both cultural geography and psychogeography. The current state of the landscape – as dispossessed and repossessed territory/ property enmeshed in relationships that encompass both the past and the present – is central to contemporary self-definition, as well as to the retrospective understanding of how and why empire happened. In psychological terms, again, the residual nature of colonist culture in decolonised nations functions as a constant reminder of the past’s uncanny coexistence with the present: such intrusions of the past into the present, whether these be expressed in the revelation of historical misdeeds or else the presence of ghosts, have long been a component of European Gothic. If the colonial past is easily Gothicised in its relationship to the postcolonial present, then it logically follows that the relationship of the aggregated past and present might engage in a similar relationship with an impending or projected global future. It is at this juncture that postcolonial Gothic presents an epistemological and aesthetic edge to the more recent theory of global Gothic. Global Gothic should be regarded as a body of generic work still actively in formation, and its international relationships and generic homogenisation embrace the former colonising nations as much as those territories and cultures which they historically possessed and exploited. Its presence, logically, should make distinctions such as generic postcolonialism redundant – though given the importance of postcolonial Gothic in the negotiation

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of modernity in contemporary culture, its critical eclipse seems somewhat unlikely, at least in the foreseeable future. Bibliography Althans, Katrin. Darkness Subverted: Aboriginal Gothic in Black Australian Literature and Film. Gottingën: Bonn University Press, 2010. Banerjee, Sukanya. ‘Political Economy, the Gothic, and the Question of Imperial Citizenship’, Victorian Studies, 47 (2005): 260–71. Brantlinger, Patrick. ‘Imperial Gothic’, in Andrew Smith and William Hughes, eds, The Victorian Gothic: An Edinburgh Companion. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012, pp. 202–16. Gladwin, Derek. Contentious Terrains: Bogland, Ireland, Postcolonial Gothic. Cork: Cork University Press, 2016. Khair, Tabish. The Gothic, Postcolonialism and Otherness: Ghosts from Elsewhere. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Luckhurst, Roger. ‘Gothic Colonies, 1850–1920’, in Glennis Byron and Dale Townshend, eds, The Gothic World. London: Routledge, 2014, pp. 62–71. Paravisini-Gebert, Lizabeth. ‘Colonial and Postcolonial Gothic: The Caribbean’, in Jerrold E. Hogle, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002, pp. 229–57. Procter, James, and Angela Smith. ‘Gothic and Empire’, in Catherine Spooner and Emma McEvoy, eds, The Routledge Companion to Gothic. London: Routledge, 2007, pp. 95–104. Punter, David, ed. A New Companion to the Gothic. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012, pp. 367–441, passim. Rudd, Alison. Postcolonial Gothic Fictions from the Caribbean, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2010. Smith, Andrew, and William Hughes, eds. Empire and the Gothic: The Politics of Genre. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. Yao, Christine. ‘Gothic Monstrosity: Charles Brockden Brown’s Edgar Huntly and the Trope of the Bestial Indian’, in Joel Faflak and Jason Haslam, eds, American Gothic Culture: An Edinburgh Companion. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016, pp. 25–43

Ecocriticism Initiated as early as the 1970s in the United States, ecocriticism imbricates environmental awareness (and on occasions activism also) with the study of how the physical environment is expressed, explained and, indeed, theorised through literature and other cultural media.

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Though at first a marginal movement within academia, ecocritical thought has progressively attained an institutional status following wide acceptance of scientific claims regarding the damaging effects of climate change upon both global and local environments. Ecocriticism does not, however, limit the scope of its critical gaze to the contemporary. Indeed, much of the early impetus of the tradition is derived from a period which spans the eighteenth-century fin de siècle and the mid-nineteenth century. American ecocriticism owes much to the writings of the American Transcendentalists, most notably Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–82), Margaret Fuller (1810–50) and Henry David Thoreau (1817–62). British ecocriticism, which emerged as a discrete tradition in the 1990s, draws heavily upon the influence of Romanticism in its paradigmatic function as a European tradition of nature writing. Neither British nor American ecocriticism expressed any substantial interest in the Gothic until the close of the first decade of the twenty-first century. Logically, ecocriticism is preoccupied with the physical environment, though it is very clear that ‘nature’ is itself a contentious and disputable term, embracing, as it does, spaces and conceptualities as diverse as the wilderness and farmland, and describing behaviours such as hunting which, though natural to carnivorous wildlife, are apparently condemnable when pursued by omnivorous humanity. Ecocriticism, therefore, is engaged in a debate that does not merely concern the representation of the natural and the unnatural, but also embraces a critique of the culturally and intellectually acceptable in human behaviours and aspirations. Inevitably, this means that ecocriticism must concern itself with the built as well as the organic environment, and with the interface of corporate possession with those spaces (oceans, deserts, common land) which by their very nature resist any implication of specific ownership. It is, therefore, at times a highly politicised corner of academic debate. The explicit application of ecocriticism to Gothic began in earnest with the publication of the edited collection Ecogothic in 2013, a volume rapidly followed by a special issue of the journal Gothic Studies on ‘The EcoGothic in the Long Nineteenth Century’ in 2014. Ecogothic – with or without the pivotal mid-point capital letter – exhibits a range of characteristic preoccupations. These include a specific interest in the wilderness as, variously, an environment that is sublime, threatening, nurturant and post-apocalyptic.

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The inhabitants – animal, human and hybridised – that populate that significant space are, likewise, a focus for ecogothic consideration, for example in the guise of zombies, post-apocalyptic cannibals or their potential victims. Such concerns transfer easily, it might be added, to the urban Gothic when that aspect of the genre depicts feral behaviour in supposedly civilised space. Human–animal hybridity in terms of the physical body as well as individual and group psychology has likewise developed as a distinct theme within ecogothic, most notably through the werewolf but also through the evocative though sporadic presence of the pagan deity Pan. Finally, ecogothic enjoys a definite application to national as well as regional Gothics. This is perhaps most clearly displayed in the attention paid to Canadian ecogothic, though it has its application also in readings of isolated communities, and those marginal landscapes which separate politically discrete countries or demarcate the bounds of land and sea, or mountain and plain.

Bibliography Armbruster, Karla, and K. R. Wallace, eds. Beyond Nature Writing: Expanding the Boundaries of Ecocriticism. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2001. Atwood, Margaret. Strange Things: The Malevolent North in Canadian Literature. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995. Bate, Jonathan. Romantic Ecology: Wordsworth and the Environmental Tradition. London: Routledge, 1991. Bate, Jonathan. The Song of the Earth. London: Picador, 2000. Buell, Lawrence. The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995. Coupe, Laurence, ed. The Green Studies Reader: From Romanticism to Ecocriticism. London: Routledge, 2000. Del Principe, David, ed. ‘The EcoGothic in the Long Nineteenth Century’, Gothic Studies, 16/1 (May 2014): 1–127. Edwards, Justin D. Gothic Canada: Reading the Spectre of a National Literature. Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 2005. Garrard, Greg. Ecocriticism. London: Routledge, 2004. Garrard, Greg. ‘Environment’ in William Hughes, David Punter and Andrew Smith, eds, The Encyclopedia of the Gothic. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013, vol. 1, pp. 216–19.

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Glotfelty, Cheryll, and Harold Fromm, eds. The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996. Kerridge, Richard. Writing the Environment: Ecocriticism and Literature. London: Zed, 1998. Smith, Andrew, and William Hughes, eds. Ecogothic. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013. Soper, Kate. What is Nature? Culture, Politics, and the Non-Human. Oxford: Blackwell, 1995.

Gender Studies The institutional sexism of academia was instrumental in the evolution of that corrective and radical approach to literary criticism popularly known as women’s studies. That specific term, though, is far too narrow – and no doubt, in the eyes of some perceivers, far too provocative – to encompass and express the pervasive and at times determining effect of gender upon writers and readers. For this reason, the field of gender studies has supplemented or conditioned, rather than eclipsed, the still vibrant field of women’s studies, directing a critical gaze upon how the cultural practices which define, transmit and perpetuate discrete gender standards function in both historical and contemporary milieux. Part of the early mission of women’s studies in its application to Gothic fiction was to recover the works and reputation of neglected female authors within a genre perceptibly dominated by male-authored fictions. Gothic authorship, it should be noted, was dominated by female writers in the first wave of the genre, though their works were often published anonymously or else in a titular succession in which each new novel was linked to a previous text through the formula ‘by the author of …’. Beyond this, the feminist consciousness of women’s studies characteristically sought to chart how writers within the genre expressed the female experience through fiction. Ellen Moers’ definition of Female Gothic should be regarded as a landmark in this context, given its vision of the Gothic as one of comparatively few routes by which female strength, as well as female vulnerability under patriarchal culture, might be not merely expressed but debated and exemplified. In recent years Moers’ definition, which referred explicitly only to female-authored Gothic, has been radically revised, and the conceptuality of the term has become expanded in an ongoing debate that sees male authors

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as participants in a broader engagement regarding the relationships between gender and repression. It is this latter development that characterises how contemporary gender studies engages with the Gothic. In effect, the critical gaze has become progressively directed as much towards the male author and the male character as it was hitherto towards their female counterparts. This reapplication of theory has been fuelled in part by the parallel rise of queer theory, and its specific interest not merely in the homosexual and lesbian character or author but also in those individuals demarcated as departing from consensus culture. Gender studies, in a sense, thus sees both sexes as being both shaped and potentially victimised by the western patriarchal (and heterosexual) cultural consensus. In the case of men, gendered readings of the Gothic therefore take note of how male–male relationships (which may be culturally homosocial rather than physically homosexual) provide an alternative to the reproductive imperative of social identification based on lineage and inheritance. Such readings may see these male spaces – be they secret cabals, banditti, the professions of law and medicine, or the church – as exclusive and misogynistic, though they may take an alternative stance and construct these as spaces where ‘different’ or ‘queer’ masculinity may function under an alternative morality or governance. The conventions that structure approved models of masculinity – most notably the perception of knightly chivalry in the historical past and its subsequent configuration as a social practice privileging the defence of women – may likewise be seen as repressing both sexes even where they celebrate an ideal that rarefies the qualities of men and women. Ambivalence with regard to conventional behaviour, it might be argued, is a distinguishing characteristic of gender studies.

Bibliography Baker, Brian. ‘Gothic Masculinities’, in Catherine Spooner and Emma McEvoy, eds, The Routledge Companion to Gothic. London: Routledge, 2007, pp. 164–73. Brabon, Benjamin A., and Stéphanie Genz, eds. Postfeminist Gothic: Critical Interventions into Contemporary Culture. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.

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Davison, Carol Margaret. ‘The Victorian Gothic and Gender’, in Andrew Smith and William Hughes, eds, The Victorian Gothic: An Edinburgh Companion. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012, pp. 124–41. 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, 1984. Heiland, Donna. Gothic and Gender: An Introduction. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004. Horner, Avril, and Sue Zlosnik, eds. Women and the Gothic: An Edinburgh Companion. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016. Mellor, Anne K. Romanticism and Gender. London: Routledge, 1993. Milbank, Alison. ‘Gothic Femininities’, in Catherine Spooner and Emma McEvoy, eds, The Routledge Companion to Gothic. London: Routledge, 2007, pp. 155–63. Miles, Robert, ed. ‘Female Gothic Writing’, Women’s Writing, 1/2 (1994): 131–240. Moers, Ellen. Literary Women: The Great Writers. London: W. H. Allen, 1977. Wallace, Diana. Female Gothic Histories: Gender, History and the Gothic. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2013. Wallace, Diana, and Andrew Smith, eds. The Female Gothic: New Directions. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2009.

Global, National and Regional Gothic Gothic has always been an international genre, and one engaged from the eighteenth century in cross-cultural aesthetic fertilisation. The conventions of eighteenth-century British Gothic, for example, undoubtedly influenced the Ritterroman and Räuberroman traditions of Germany, and the popularity of authors such as Johan Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) and Friedrich Schiller (1759–1805) ensured that Continental Gothic both haunted and re-energised its anglophone counterpart in the Romantic nineteenth century. One might note, likewise, the influence of the serial stylistics of Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine – a significant publisher of Gothic fiction – upon the nineteenth-century American writer Edgar Allan Poe (1809–49), or the ubiquitous presence of popular British works on the shelves of colonial circulating libraries across the Empire. Arguably, Gothic was the first literary genre to be fully subjected to the distributive possibilities of both progressive technology in the print

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industry and the unprecedented network associated with local and national circulating libraries. It would be ludicrous to suggest, though, that the increasingly global presence of the Gothic from the later eighteenth century rendered the generic literatures of other nations little more than satellites of a single culturally imperial nation. If Gothic works arrived on foreign shores as British – or, indeed, English – products, their consumers were characteristically quick to demand an (at first derivative) recension of the genre populated by local character tropes and enacted within a recognisable rather than generic psychogeography. This may be discerned perhaps most obviously in the circulation of Gothic amongst those national identities which were subsumed into the United Kingdom by political legislation in 1707 and 1800. Irish and Scottish authors were among the first to extensively adapt the conventions of English Gothic to the cultural and – especially – religious conditions of nations which had traditionally enjoyed a significant degree of autonomy from English politics and manners. Hence, pioneering Irish and Scottish Gothic authors such as Charles Robert Maturin (1780–1824) and James Hogg (1770–1835) drew extensively upon the rural scenery, capital cities and local institutions of their native countries in the depiction of milieux strikingly different from the spectacular Continental, and more familiar English, backdrops favoured by earlier authors in the genre. The religious, social and political contexts of those nations, uncanny in their juxtaposition of familiarity to and difference from familiar English standards, were likewise explored through texts which, whilst they potentially confirmed the knowledge – or prejudice – of readers in Ireland and Scotland, exposed English reader to disorientating novelty. In more recent times – the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, specifically – the genre has been revitalised in this intranational context, with a postcolonial consciousness underwriting fiction originating not merely from post-Union Ireland but also from Scotland, Wales and, increasingly, Cornwall. Gothic, strikingly, is one of the defining cultural markers of a post-United Kingdom. The genre, is likewise, an indicative presence in the cultures of European colonialism and postcolonialism. Within the British Empire specifically, Gothic was casually transported as entertainment for colonists in Canada, Australia, New Zealand and India, but soon became a vehicle – often through inflection within other popu-

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lar genres such as crime fiction and the adventure novel – through which to explore and rationalise the difference of uneasily appropriated lands and colonised peoples. If the earliest works produced within the colonies were the product of those educated on domestic shores, later fictions developed these familiar stylistics through a direct encounter with – and very often a physical birth-place within – the overseas territory. This form of Gothic, quite naturally, should be considered as much in colonial and postcolonial theoretical perspectives as it should in its status as national Gothic. The borders of applicable theory, like those of sovereign and colonised nations, are frequently semi-congruent. Non-anglophone Gothics were quick to develop in the major linguistic cultures of Europe, with original generic novels and plays being produced in French and German from the later eighteenth century, and translations from the English being widely distributed in both France and Germany as well as in Italy, Spain and the Netherlands. Often overlooked is the penetration of Gothic into the numerically minor languages of Europe: Malta had an indigenous Gothic as early as 1899 by way of the writings of Arturo Caruana (dates not known), and Iceland was one of the first nations to see an authorised translation of Dracula (1897) by Bram Stoker (1847–1912). Beyond the anglophone world, Asian Gothic is a highly developed tradition, its adoption of historical generic standards being heavily interfaced with distinctive local versions of the demonic, the ghostly and the monstrous. Perhaps most strikingly of all contemporary non-European Gothics, Asian Gothic – particularly in its Japanese incarnation – now draws specifically upon cinematic and animated horror in preference to older forms of fictional media. It is the anglophone Gothics, though, that are the most familiar in terms of their global reach, and the rise of American Gothic as a shaping force in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries cannot be ignored. Just as early British Gothic utilised fully the technology and distributive networks of its day, so US Gothic has been disseminated in the original language and in translation not merely through publishing but also – more widely – through cinematic and televisual media. It is North American Gothic television that is arguably almost wholly responsible for the revival of an earlier serial Gothic tradition, as well as for the significant revisions made to the conventions of the vampire, werewolf and zombie in recent years. American Gothic is, inevitably, a significant influence upon both the stylistic

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and political tenor of global Gothic, as defined by Glennis Byron, this latter being the contemporary incarnation of the genre in which national atomisation is increasingly impinged upon by transnational homogenisation. Bibliography Aaron, Jane. Welsh Gothic. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2013. Aldaner Reyes, Xavier. Spanish Gothic: National Identity, Collaboration and Cultural Adaptation. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2017. Byron, Glennis, ed. Globalgothic. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013. Crow, Charles. American Gothic. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2009. Davison, Carol Margaret, and Monica Germanà, eds. Scottish Gothic: An Edinburgh Companion. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017. Edwards, Justin D. Gothic Canada: Reading the Spectre of a National Literature. Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 2005. Edwards, Justin D. ‘British Gothic Nationhood, 1760–1830’, in Glennis Byron and Dale Townshend, eds, The Gothic World. London: Routledge, 2014, pp. 51–61. Gibson, Matthew. The Fantastic and European Gothic: History, Literature and the French Revolution. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2013. Horner, Avril, ed. European Gothic: A Spirited Exchange, 1760–1960. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002. Horner, Avril, and Sue Zlosnik, eds. Le Gothic: Influences and Appropriations in Europe and America. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2008. Hughes, William, and Ruth Heholt, eds. Gothic Britain: Dark Places in the Provinces and Margins of the British Isles. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2018. Kavka, Misha, Jennifer Lawn and Mary Paul, eds. Gothic NZ: The Darker Side of Kiwi Culture. Dunedin: Otago University Press, 2006. Morin, Christina, and Niall Gillespie, eds. Irish Gothics: Genres, Forms, Modes and Traditions, 1760–1890. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2014. Ng, Andrew Hock-Soon, ed. Asian Gothic: Essays on Literature, Film and Anime. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2008. Trigg, Stephanie. Medievalism and the Gothic in Australian Culture. Melbourne: Melbourne University Publishing, 2006

New Historicism and Cultural Materialism New historicism is a distinctly materialistic theoretical approach to criticism, and in its application to the Gothic from the late 1980s

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may be seen as part of a broader reaction to the initial domination of the generic debate by interpretations derived from psychoanalysis. Originating in US academic criticism of early modern drama, new historicism refuses to privilege or prioritise the specifically literary text in critical rhetoric, and instead considers it as an equally weighted participant in a broader cultural field. This process may be thematised and narrowed somewhat, so that a literary text can be read as an expression of, for instance, a culture’s attitudes to sexuality, its responses to political or religious crisis, or its involvement in imperial enterprise. In this respect, new historicism is very much germane to the academic culture that has generated, for example, specific theories of colonial and postcolonial Gothic, as well as broader interdisciplinary fields such as the medical humanities. Indeed, as these examples might suggest, new historicism is very much bound up in charting how power – in the broad sense of that term, meaning the ability to define, direct or control – has been exercised in a historical past now accessible by the subsequent perceiver only by way of textual sources. Like new historicism, cultural materialism rose in part from a more politicised critical attitude, again applied to early modern drama in the first instance. As a critical philosophy, it is characteristically leftleaning and perceives – within literature especially, and other forms of textuality frequently – an antagonistic attitude towards contemporary values. In this respect, cultural materialism projects a more radical interpretative gaze than its new historicist counterpart, in that it is inclined to highlight perceived textual resistance to unfavourable cultural conditions rather than dwell upon those conditions as a matrix for the production of textuality. The two, though, are frequently congruent in their use of contextual sources and inclination to value the textually ephemeral as much as the institutionally canonical. Early exercises in both new historicism and cultural materialism were on occasions derided for their reluctance to engage with the critical archive, and were sometimes associated with a dismissive attitude towards academic scholarship and publication. As materialist criticism matured through the final decade of the twentieth century, this supposedly characteristic eschewing of earlier scholarship gradually rescheduled itself into a self-conscious critique of less material, less political schools of thought. In Gothic, psychoanalysis was – as has been suggested – the central critical tradition against which materialist thought came to react, rhetorically as well as intellectually – though

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any school of thought which suggested that a text might be somehow ‘timeless’ or capable of signifying consistently without reference to its specific historical period was liable to similar engagement in a debate which has continued into the present century. While the epistemological and evidential differences that demarcate new historicism from cultural materialism may be of significance primarily to historians of literary theory, there is no doubt that a broad application of both has been made in recent years to the Gothic. Gothic criticism, certainly, took an openly materialistic turn as early as 1988 when Victor Sage’s Horror Fiction in the Protestant Tradition considered the sectarianism of British, Irish and American Gothic not theologically but through the rhetorical and material traces of Protestantism in law and medicine. This landmark work, to be sure, provided an epistemological foundation for several other studies, and the early 1990s were to produce a range of other monographs which situated the genre within an acute response to social, religious and political upheavals, particularly in Victorian context. Of these, Robert Mighall’s A Geography of Victorian Gothic Fiction (1999) is especially distinguished by its trenchant critique of the tenor of earlier criticism of the genre. Subsequent readings of the genre have placed Gothic fictions alongside law and science, noting how the rhetoric of professional genres often exists in a reciprocal relationship to popular fiction, and how both provide a consistent commentary on the power relationships that structure the cultures occupied by reader, writer and critic. Materialist criticism would thus appear to function far more loosely and with less emphasis upon its theoretical radicalness in Gothic than it does elsewhere in the field of literary studies. In Gothic, the debate is less about the theory and more concerned with textuality and contextuality. In this respect, the specific materialisms of new historicism and cultural materialism have elided easily with the study of discursive fields such as medicine, law, theology and rhetoric, and an admission that Gothic may make such rarefied forms of discourse available to popular audiences. Bibliography Baldick, Chris. In Frankenstein’s Shadow: Myth, Monstrosity and Nineteenth-Century Writing. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987.

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Baldick, Chris, and Robert Mighall. ‘Gothic Criticism’, in David Punter, ed., A New Companion to the Gothic. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012, pp. 267–87. Clery, E. J. The Rise of Supernatural Fiction, 1762–1800. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Grixti, Joseph. Terrors of Uncertainty: The Cultural Contexts of Horror Fiction. London: Routledge, 1989. Hughes, William. Beyond Dracula: Bram Stoker’s Fiction and its Cultural Context. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000. Hurley, Kelly. The Gothic Body: Sexuality, Materialism, and Degeneration at the Fin de Siècle. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Levinson, Marjory, ed. Rethinking Historicism: Critical Readings in Romantic History. Oxford: Blackwell, 1989. Mighall, Robert. A Geography of Victorian Gothic Fiction: Mapping History’s Nightmares. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. Miles, Robert. Gothic Writing, 1750–1820: A Genealogy. Second edition. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002. Sage, Victor. Horror Fiction in the Protestant Tradition. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988. Smith, Andrew. Victorian Demons: Medicine, Masculinity and the Gothic at the Fin de Siècle. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004. Veeser, H. Aram, ed. The New Historicism Reader. London: Routledge, 1994.

Psychoanalysis and Psychobiography Psychoanalysis was the first modern critical theory to be systematically applied to the breadth of Gothic literature, albeit in a popular rather than academic journal. Maurice Richardson’s 1959 article ‘The Psychoanalysis of Ghost Stories’ drew heavily upon Ernest Jones’ expansion of Freudian thought in On the Nightmare (1931), as well as Freud’s seminal Totem and Taboo (1912–13/1988). The connection made between the genre and the theory is logical: historically, Gothic has made frequent use of plots premised upon incest and guilt. It is, likewise, often concerned with the taboo act of murder: indeed, parricide, matricide and filicide are not infrequent themes in the genre. The associative imperative of psychoanalysis, that which seeks to identify the expression of unspeakable desire through less controlled communicative channels – dreams, slips of the tongue, jokes, popular fiction – is similarly attuned to a sexual interpretation of the preoccupations of Gothic. Ghosts represent a return of past deeds into present consciousness. Blood may stand in the place

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of semen, and any act of entering may potentially become a potent euphemism for a quite different form of penetration. Gothic Heroes elide easily into predatory fathers, heroines transform into Oedipal mothers, groups of individuals banded together against a supernatural Other become a primal horde ready to collectively despatch that which threatens their mortal ascendancy. The Gothic, in other words, is easily susceptible of those interpretative tools of Freudian analysis made familiar to criticism through not merely Totem and Taboo but also The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1901/1988), these being possibly the most accessible of Freud’s writings. These, certainly, were the two cardinal psychoanalytical texts underwriting the first edition of David Punter’s The Literature of Terror (1980; second edition 1996), an expansive critical work which shaped, profoundly, subsequent Gothic criticism. If there is one single work by Freud that appears ubiquitous in academic criticism of the genre, it is the 1919 essay ‘The Uncanny’ (1988). Even in a critical environment in which materialistic interpretations have explicitly derided Freudian analysis as being founded upon association not underwritten by evidence, this work – with its emphasis on the tense relationship between the familiar and the unfamiliar – remains ideally suited to a form of writing that grapples so much with the uncertainty of liminal positions, with characters who oscillate between the comforting binary certainties that demarcate the living from the dead, the divine from the blasphemous, the male from the female, the known from the unknown. The theory has been much enhanced by more recent critical interventions, most notably in the form of Julian Wolfreys’ imbrication of the Uncanny with Derridean thought and the effective haunting of the text. It is this disconcerting hesitation between the familiar and the unfamiliar that underwrites the apparently equally ubiquitous postFreudian theory of the Abject. Explicated in Powers of Horror (1980, trans. 1982) by Julia Kristeva, the taboo-driven repulsion behind abjection relies upon the familiar yet strange, sustaining yet potentially poisonous nature of bodily secretions and their places of exit from the body itself. Such things again remind the perceiver of a disturbing liminal state, a permeable boundary between self and Other, between heath and dis-ease, between solid and liquid, between the conditions of the physiologically contained and the contagiously eruptive, between the ordered and the chaotic. Jerrold E. Hogle has, notably, developed Kristevan abjection further through an incisive

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reading of Jean Baudrillard’s notion of the counterfeit in a critical application with implications for the breadth of the genre. Part of the debate regarding the veracity of psychoanalytic interpretation is, inevitably, premised upon the biography – and, through the act of analysis, the psychobiography – of the author as an individual. The issue here, of course, is the ultimate unknowability of authorial motivation, an epistemological problem made even more complex by the psychoanalytic convention that imbricates repressed desire, coded expression of desire and a conscious denial of that desire as a motivation for textual creativity. Biography is a troubling medium for psychoanalysis. Translation, literary convention and misinterpretation may all facilitate a reading which prioritises a hidden sexual motive over a conscious desire to make money, or which reads a typesetter’s misprint as the key to some occluded fantasy concerning Eros and Thanatos. Such things may be illustrated, for example, in Joseph Bierman’s reading of a numerical miscalculation in an early story by Bram Stoker as the visible trace of sibling rivalry, or in his later deployment of Lewin’s theory of the claustrum or enclosed space to Dracula (1897). The theoretical imperative of psychobiography is to read the text as if it were a patient on the analyst’s couch, and as if it embodied a truth visible only those familiar with the conventions of that privileged interpretative space. That space, however privileged within its own discourse, is not indisputable in the context of criticism more broadly, and so the conclusions reached by psychoanalysis and psychobiography are being increasingly deployed as rhetorical foils to the materialist interpretation that at present seems to dominate much anglophone commentary upon the genre.

Bibliography Bierman, Joseph. ‘Dracula: Prolonged Childhood Illness and the Oral Triad’, American Imago, 29 (1972): 186–98. Bierman, Joseph. ‘A Crucial Stage in the Writing of Dracula’, in William Hughes and Andrew Smith, eds, Bram Stoker: History, Psychoanalysis and the Gothic. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998, pp. 151–72. Buse, Peter, and Andrew Stott, eds. Ghosts: Deconstruction, Psychoanalysis, History. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999. Davies, Michael. ‘“What’s the Story, Mother?”: Abjection and Anti-Feminism in Alien and Aliens’, Gothic Studies, 2/2 (2000): 245–56.

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Freud, Sigmund. The Psychopathology of Everyday Life. Angela Richards and Albert Dickson, eds, The Pelican Freud Library, London: Penguin, 1988, vol. 5. Freud, Sigmund. Totem and Taboo. Angela Richards and Albert Dickson, eds, The Pelican Freud Library, London: Penguin, 1988, vol. 13, pp. 43–224. Freud, Sigmund. ‘The Uncanny’, trans James Strachey, et al. Angela Richards and Albert Dickson, eds, The Pelican Freud Library, London: Penguin, 1988, vol. 14, pp. 335–76. Hogle, Jerrold E. ‘The Gothic Ghost of the Counterfeit and the Progress of Abjection’, in David Punter, ed., A New Companion to the Gothic. Oxford: Blackwell, 2012, pp. 496–509. Jones, Ernest. On the Nightmare. London: Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1931. Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press, 1982. Luckhurst, Roger. ‘Psychoanalysis’, in William Hughes, David Punter and Andrew Smith, eds, The Encyclopedia of the Gothic. Oxford: WileyBlackwell, 2013, vol. 1, pp. 526–31. Punter, David. The Literature of Terror: A History of Gothic Fictions from 1765 to the Present Day. London: Longman, 1996. Second edition. Richardson, Maurice. ‘The Psychoanalysis of Ghost Stories’, The Twentieth Century, 166 (1959): 419–31. Wolfreys, Julian. Victorian Hauntings: Spectrality, Gothic, the Uncanny and Literature. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002.

Queer Theory Despite popular misconceptions regarding its focus, queer theory is not simply an appropriate theoretical tool for the examination of texts by gay or lesbian writers, or of works that address homosexual sexuality. Though it is a natural development from earlier academic gender studies, the implications and applications of queer theory now far exceed the consideration of physiologically defined sexual identity and of sexual orientation. To be queer is to be different. The state of queerness may be imposed upon the queered individual by some external (and thus implicitly powerful or authoritative) institution or individual, or else may be a self-defining gesture, a queering that empowers the self by proclaiming its departure – or liberation – from the constraints of orthodoxy. Imposed by others as a badge of shame, proclaimed by the self as an emblem of pride, a queered identity effectively demarcates and defines difference and dissonance.

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To be queer, therefore, may be far more than merely to establish the self, or be denominated by others, as one whose specifically sexual preferences differ from the consensus view of normality or acceptability. A political or religious dissident may be queer on account of their specific beliefs: homosexuality, in common with sedition and heresy, has often attracted both the punitive attention of formal authority and the violence of the mob. Those denominated as ‘disabled’ may be queer, because while their perceived physical difference may cause them to be excluded from certain places or activities, their consciousness of that exclusion may lead to the formation of a resistant and radical identity capable of redefining the relationship between perceptibly different physicalities: when disability is queered from within, the ‘disabled’ may empower themselves as the ‘differently abled’. Similar implications, it might be added, characterise the definition of mental difference by both medical professionals and mainstream culture, which need to be taken in the context of how the medical subject may wish to define the self in resistance to those who would dismiss any deviation from consensus simplistically as illness. Children, too, are queer, because of their dependent and restricted position within adult culture – a position which is often accompanied by an acute personal sense of indignity, if not injustice. The state of being queer may be atomised in the singular self, though it has currency also in the community of queered individuals either denominating themselves, or being defined, as outside of consensus normality. The Gothic, in a sense, has always been queer. Resisting at its inception the austere epistemology of the Enlightenment, the genre has progressively expressed religious controversy, political dissidence and sexual perversity whilst celebrating that most antisocial of individuals outside of culture, the Gothic Hero. The persecuted and obviously mortal heroes and heroines of First-Wave Gothic partake of the queer just as much as the sexually ambivalent vampires of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. It is a genre that depicts outsiders and persecution, and its fictions are often written by those whose religious, political or sexual identities place them in an uneasy position with respect to mainstream culture. The denomination of queerness, indeed, extends to the genre as a conceptual whole. Condemned as immoral by early critics, the Gothic continues to be dismissed as ephemeral in certain academic quarters: the subversive innovations advanced by best-selling genre fictions, apparently, are a less appro-

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priate subject for students to study than the tired orthodoxies of plays that are no longer produced, penned by long-dead and now-obscure dramatists. Queer theory, by its very nature, has a commitment to diversity, difference and tolerance. In this respect, it is an ideal tool for the criticism not merely of Gothic but of culture as a whole. Bibliography Bruhm, Steven. ‘Picture This: Stephen King’s Queer Gothic’, in David Punter, ed., A New Companion to the Gothic. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012, pp. 469–80. Fincher, Max. Queering the Gothic in the Romantic Age: The Penetrating Eye. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007. Fuss, Diana, ed. Inside/Out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories. New York: Routledge, 1991. Haefele-Thomas, Ardel. Queer Others in Victorian Gothic: Transgressing Monstrosity. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2012. Haggerty, George E. Queer Gothic. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006. Hall, Donald E. Queer Theories. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2003. Hughes, William, and Andrew Smith, eds. Queering the Gothic. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009. Palmer, Paulina. Lesbian Gothic: Transgressive Fictions. London: Cassell, 1999. Palmer, Paulina. The Queer Uncanny: New Perspectives on the Gothic. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2012. Palmer, Paulina. Queering Contemporary Gothic Narrative, 1970–2012. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2016. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire. New York: Colombia University Press, 1985. Thomas, Ardel. ‘Queer Victorian Gothic’, in Andrew Smith and William Hughes, eds, The Victorian Gothic: An Edinburgh Companion. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012, pp. 142–55. Turner, Kate. ‘Queer Scottish Gothic’, in Carol Margaret Davison and Monica Germanà, eds, Scottish Gothic: An Edinburgh Companion. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017, pp. 208–21.

Theological and Sectarian Perspectives The Gothic was historically shaped by – and continues to draw upon – the language and doctrine of Christian religion. Even in a modern age when secularity, multi-faith culture and globalisation have diminished or even parted the singular and defining ties between sectarianism and

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nationalism, the distinctive language and frequently retold stories of the Bible remain embedded in anglophone culture, and continue to function as muted allusions to past conflicts and lingering cultural divisions. Even in those twentieth- and twenty-first-century fictions where identifiable sectarian difference has been replaced not by a specific ecumenicalism but rather by a vague, residual impressionism that merely recalls Christianity, the old religious standards of crucifixes as a prophylactic against vampires, and prayers as a defence against ghosts, appear to hold some credence. So long as supernatural beings continue to exist in fiction, the religious context of Gothic will likewise persist: the twenty-first century is thus anything but an age of secularisation and atheism. First-Wave Gothic is a product of English Protestant culture, and the ambivalence of British Episcopalian attitudes towards Continental Roman Catholicism – hostile and suspicious yet fascinated – largely underwrote the genre’s recurrent deployment of cultural geographies and characterisations. In the earliest phases of the genre there appears, at first sight, to be a discernible antipathy towards the institutions of the Roman Catholic church, with the celibate priesthood, the monastic houses and the Inquisition functioning as specific spaces where the purportedly arbitrary and tyrannical aspects of the ‘old’ religion may particularly be displayed. If this reflects an age in which the Protestant defeat of Jacobite rebels in 1715 and 1745 still functioned as an active cultural memory, then it is curious how individuals within the Roman Catholic communion – even, on occasion, priests and nuns – are elsewhere fictionalised as compassionate and humane. The message, implicitly, is that whilst the Roman Catholic church as an institution seemed incapable of reform, its adherents might on occasions display attributes which set them at odds with the doctrines of their faith, allowing them to function effectively as ‘honorary Protestants’ for some portion of the fiction. One might note also that – in Ann Radcliffe’s Female Gothic in particular – the Roman Catholic heroine is frequently depicted as being as immune to ghostly superstition as any rational Protestant, her fears centring upon the physical or sexual threat posed by the human rather than any spiritual damnation associated with ghost or demon. If this much is implicitly a critique of the somewhat generalised and negative filter through which eighteenth-century Protestantism conventionally viewed its doctrinal Other, the nineteenth century was to bring a more sustained interrogation of the limits not merely of the Reformed

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faith but of Christianity more generally. The juxtaposition of Scottish Episcopalian and Presbyterian attitudes by James Hogg (1770–1835) is not unique, though it is the most protracted treatment of the crumbling of Protestant hegemony. Interestingly, the most provocative examinations of faith in the nineteenth century come not from English authors but from those who occupy the other component nations of the ostensibly United Kingdom – most especially the sectarian cultures of Scotland and Ireland. It is three of the canonical Gothic authors from the latter country – Charles Robert Maturin (1780–1824), J. Sheridan Le Fanu (1814–73) and Bram Stoker (1847–1912) – who produced possibly the most ambivalent of the century’s sectarian narratives – works in which Roman Catholic ceremonial seems to function with a puissance equal, and on occasion demonstrably superior, to the most private of Protestant communions with a listening Deity. The rise of an ecumenical consciousness in everyday Christianity, and the apparent decline in religious observance more generally, seem to have been the major factor in the slow withering of sectarian Gothic. The new century seems to be characterised not by difference but by doubt. Writers such as Arthur Machen (1863–1947), Lord Dunsany (1878–1957) and H. P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) have demonstrably eschewed the intricacies of sectarian debate in favour of bringing the representatives of broad Christianity into contact with hitherto unknown spiritual beings of ostensibly equal potency. The issues now, therefore, are not of faith but rather of faiths – one of these faiths being that secular belief in science and secularity which disputes the very existence of a deity or deities.

Bibliography Duncan, Ian. ‘Fanaticism and Civil Society: Hogg’s Justified Sinner’, Novel: A Forum on Fiction, 42/2 (2009): 343–8. Eagleton, Terry. Heathcliff and the Great Hunger. London: Verso, 1995. Foster, Roy. Paddy and Mr Punch. London: Penguin, 1995. Haslam, Richard. ‘Maturin and the “Calvinist Sublime”’, in Victor Sage and Allan Lloyd Smith, eds, Gothick: Origins and Innovations. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1994, pp. 44–56. Haydon, Colin. Anti-Catholicism in Eighteenth-Century England, c.1714–1780: A Political and Social Study. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993. Norman, Edward R. Anti-Catholicism in Victorian England. London: Barnes and Noble, 1968.

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O’Malley, Patrick. Catholicism, Sexual Deviance, and Victorian Gothic Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Sage, Victor. Horror Fiction in the Protestant Tradition. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988. Tarr, Mary Muriel. Catholicism in Gothic Fiction: A Study of the Nature and Function of Catholic Materials in Gothic Fiction in England (1762–1820). Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1946. Tumbleson, Raymond D. Catholicism in the English Protestant Imagination: Nationalism, Religion and Literature, 1660–1745. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Wheeler, Michael. Heaven, Hell and the Victorians. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Wheeler, Michael. The Old Enemies: Catholic and Protestant in NineteenthCentury English Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.

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Fifteen Key Works of Gothic Fiction 1. The Castle of Otranto (Horace Walpole, 1764) As the first Gothic novel to identify itself explicitly as such – in the Preface to the 1765 second edition – this relatively short work by Horace Walpole (1717–97) is essential reading for any student of the genre. The two Prefaces should be read prior to the novel itself: they establish central Gothic preconceptions of documentary authenticity, testimony and authorial self-consciousness. The novel itself likewise exhibits many characters and plot devices that have persisted across the subsequent existence of the genre. Among these are the recurrent characteristics of the Gothic Hero, the beleaguered heroine and the chivalric hero, their coexistence being underwritten by a plot based upon the patriarchal power of familial lineage and inheritance, and the relationship of these to marital, adulterous, non-consensual and incestuous sexuality. This is an avowedly supernatural work: a mobile and fragmentary statue, a portrait which quits its frame, and a skeletonised ghost appear and disappear within the seemingly permeable walls which demarcate the boundaries of a castle and an abbey, and the suggestive atmospherics of shadows and noises likewise transform the corridors of the titular castle and its subterranean chambers into a claustrophobic labyrinth. Though this work is the foundation of the early Gothic’s interest in Roman Catholicism and Continental feudalism, it is equally significant in its suggestion that the past is itself a form of ghost which may intrude into the present, disrupting the lives even of those who are ignorant of historical injustices or abuses. 2. The Italian (Ann Radcliffe, 1797) The Italian is in many ways the most sophisticated stylistic achievement of the first wave of Gothic fiction. Historically, literary criticism

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has made much of the novel’s supposed genesis in an ostensible battle of taste between Ann Radcliffe (1764–1823) and Matthew G. Lewis (1775–1818), though The Italian interrogates matters of style and content first raised by Walpole just over thirty years earlier. Crucially, Radcliffe’s work here (and in all but one of her other novels) eschews the supernatural, and establishes human intrigue as the cause of the misfortunes which fracture the heterosexual romance plot between the virginal heroine and the virtuous hero. If the dangers of The Italian are human rather than ghostly, their threat is more suggested than actual, even in the chambers of the Roman Catholic Inquisition, where torture instruments are exhibited but never actually utilised. Radcliffe, indeed, makes full use of the Burkean theory of the Sublime. Obscurity stimulates the mind and enhances imaginative perception; geographical immensity induces awe and contemplation. The occluded sins of the past, again, disrupt the peace of the present, and the central Gothic Hero of the narrative – Schedoni, simultaneously rapacious nobleman and murderous priest – is more menacingly nuanced than his counterpart in Radcliffe’s seminal The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794). 3. Northanger Abbey (Jane Austen, 1818) Written by Jane Austen (1775–1817) around 1798–9 and published posthumously, Northanger Abbey is a work grounded in eighteenthcentury popular taste. Austen’s skilfully comedic pastiche of FirstWave Gothic refers explicitly to The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) by Ann Radcliffe (1764–1823), but also recalls the now-obscure ‘horrid’ novels that equally catered for the public appetite for Gothic. The satire of Northanger Abbey is twofold. Austen mocks the stylistics of a genre which was, for some readers, becoming hackneyed less than forty years after its inception. Through her ironic and anachronistic recounting of a classic Gothic plot of intrigue, apparent murder and abduction she further lampoons the genre’s readers – female readers specifically – for their apparently passive acceptance of a relatively stable diet of plot and characterisation. At the heart of the latter critique is Austen’s ostensible heroine, Catherine Morland, an adolescent whose life is so unexceptional that she imagines herself the heroine of one of the Gothic novels she consumes so avidly whilst at home and during a visit to the English spa city, Bath. The opening sentence of the novel sounds a keynote for that which follows, for Morland’s

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whole approach to heroinism is flawed by a far too obsessive pursuit of generic adventure in an essentially mundane British environment. The Gothic Hero, indeed, is no Continental tyrant, and the chivalric hero saves the heroine’s mind rather than her never-imperilled body. 4. Frankenstein (Mary Shelley, 1818) Frankenstein is another canonical Gothic work which appeared in two separate editions accompanied by two discrete Prefaces. The first edition was prefaced by Percy Shelley (1792–1822), the second by Mary Shelley (1797–1851), and these discrete statements provide crucial contextual information upon the general intellectual culture and specific personal circumstances which generated the novel. The remainder of the work is narrated within an epistolary frame, the testimony of Victor Frankenstein being embedded within the traveller’s tale of another scientist, Robert Walton. Frankenstein is possibly the most openly philosophical of Gothic fictions. Whilst the novel speculates upon both medical ethics and the efficacy of contemporary technology to address the inevitability of mortality, it is concerned also with the conventionally human issues of personal development, social acculturation and parental responsibility. Some modern readers, introduced first to Frankenstein through film and television, will no doubt find the work somewhat dull, given that there are no detailed accounts of Galvanic technology or visceral depictions of surgical practice. The novel is, though, acute in its relation of the suffering of a creature who, having been formed innocent, is rejected both by its creator and by its own species. To a modern critical readership, Frankenstein has much to say regarding prejudice, disability, gender and the power exercised over others by professional and authoritative individuals. Here, the laboratory has replaced the castle of earlier Gothic, the doctor has taken the place of the priest, and science has eclipsed religion. 5. Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque (Edgar Allan Poe, 1839) Edgar Allan Poe’s (1809–49) short tales should be read in the context of the Preface which first accompanied them. In this statement, Poe defended his fiction – which had appeared sporadically in journals prior to its 1839 publication in two volumes – from the charge that it

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was overly influenced by German horror. As the phrase ‘Arabesque’ – which has a specific application in the history and criticism of art – suggests, these are works of complexity and structure, and though critics have often neglected the less macabre narratives in favour of those usually extracted as Gothic exemplars, the whole range of stories enjoy a degree of nuanced elaboration that sets them aside from works published in both the US and Europe in the third decade of the nineteenth century. The collection contains two of Poe’s most famous tales connected with returns from the dead, ‘Ligeia’ and ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’, as well as ‘William Wilson’, a fatalistic doppelganger narrative. ‘Morella’, which depicts an apparent act of reincarnation, is likewise worthy of attention. ‘Metzengerstein’, incidentally, is very much a tale in the German vein. Poe’s grotesquery does not confine itself to narratives of death and vivisepulture, however. A gifted satirist and humourist, Poe implicitly mocks seafarers’ tales in ‘MS Found in a Bottle’, albeit in a way that couples the incongruous with sublimity of description. ‘The Man That Was Used Up’ is, similarly, something of a pastiche of amplified public reputations. The collection as a whole illustrates Poe’s talents across both the humorous and the horrific in writing. 6. In a Glass Darkly (J. Sheridan Le Fanu, 1872) J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s (1814–73) collection of five short narratives illustrates many of the core themes characteristic of the ghost story. Originally published in popular periodicals, the stories are linked by an unnamed editor who ostensibly presents a representative range of medical cases investigated by his deceased mentor, a clinically incompetent German physician with metaphysical leanings. These include a hallucinatory haunting which is investigated as a gastric complaint; a fatal case of persecution mania associated with a vengeful ghost; a recurrent spectral visitation in a haunted house; and an instance of lesbian vampiric predation. The other tale has no supernatural content, but – like Jane Austen’s (1775–1817) Northanger Abbey (1818) – self-consciously mocks the incautious reader of popular romance. Le Fanu’s ghost stories, within and beyond In a Glass Darkly, are masterly in both their economy of description and their creation of suspense within a relatively short textual space. Particularly noteworthy is the author’s deployment of uncertainty: ghosts are not always

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readily identified as such; seemingly innocuous substances and subtle drugs alter perception; ostensibly friendly associates may entertain potentially fatal ulterior motives. These are narratives of the interior, be that interior a representation of a mind or a house. They are claustrophobic, dark and at times not wholly accessible to those in the fiction who are outside the consciousness of the haunted individual. 7. Dracula (Bram Stoker, 1897) In common with Frankenstein (1818), Dracula is a novel which is usually encountered first through its popular reputation, or else by way of a film, rather than directly in its original, written form. Also like Mary Shelley’s (1797–1851) novel, it may disappoint some readers in that the vampire appears relatively little across the course of the narrative, the novel dwelling more extensively upon clinical and amateur interpretations of deteriorating mental and physical states. It is a rich work for the student of Gothic, though, and combines classic stylistic elements with contemporary issues to produce a narrative susceptible of a wide range of theoretical interpretations. Though the central theme of vampirism has obvious psychoanalytical resonances, the symbolic link between the circulation of blood and that of capital provides a credible critique of late Victorian capitalism, just as the motif of invasion and conquest echoes the culture of the age of European imperialism. Dracula, though, is equally imbricated with issues of gender, from the circulation of women within patriarchy to the rise of a financially and sexually independent proto-feminist consciousness. Masculinity, both heterosexually chivalric and subversively queer, is likewise interrogated in the relations between the sexes as well as in same-sex encounters. Bram Stoker’s (1847–1912) novel is perhaps more graphic than suggestive, the vampire’s violence being quite explicitly conveyed, though the British press of the day commented upon the work’s uncompromising horror rather than its erotic freighting. It is a popular novel with surprising depth. 8. The Werewolf of Paris (Guy Endore, 1933) Though the werewolf is a frequently encountered figure in European folklore, it is far less common in Gothic fiction – at least before the relatively recent vogue in popular culture for encounters between

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apparently domesticated vampires and lycanthropes. Guy Endore’s (1900–70) work draws less on the earliest anglophone werewolf narratives of the second quarter of the nineteenth century and more upon the cultural fears circulating globally in the years immediately prior to the rise of European fascism. These fears demonised certain groups within society as intellectually, socially or sexually degenerate and thereby likely also to induce degeneration in others not so afflicted. The novel begins with the sexually immodest behaviour of an American woman in a Parisian bar, this being interpreted by one of those present as an incidence of degenerate atavism. This opinion in turn leads the narrator to the contemplation of a nineteenth-century case of atavistic behaviour which involved sadomasochistic sexuality, the self-degradation of a genteel woman, and a final twist where, ambiguously, a twentieth-century exhumation of the body of the male perpetrator reveals a vulpine rather than human carcase. The reader is led to speculate upon the human – or supernatural – explanations for the protagonist’s behaviour, as well as to interrogate the variant European and American explanations proffered as an explanation for personal deviance. 9. Rebecca (Daphne du Maurier, 1938) Daphne du Maurier’s (1907–89) best-selling novel is an effective heir to the eighteenth-century Female Gothic of Ann Radcliffe (1764–1823) and her contemporaries, though it arguably draws also upon the epistemological uncertainties projected in later Gothic works such as Henry James’ (1843–1916) The Turn of the Screw (1898). The contemporary setting of the work does not disguise its reliance upon traditional Gothic figures such as the Gothic Hero – here, a wealthy widower with a mysterious past, recently married to a naïve and much younger heroine – and the villainous servant, a housekeeper devoted to her dead mistress, the Rebecca of the novel’s title, and visibly hostile to the noticeably unnamed new wife. The physical setting of the main body of the narrative in the wild landscape of Cornwall adds further drama – the marital home itself being potentially as sublime as the nearby coastline – and further tension is induced by a shipwreck and a fire. The house is haunted not by an actual ghost but by the lingering atmosphere of Rebecca’s mercurial temper, and by the marital jealousy associated with the

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adulterous liaisons with which she once taunted her husband – though the heroine’s appearance at a ball in a costume which links her to her dead predecessor is indubitably uncanny. Rebecca’s death, legally judged to be suicide, is, however, a consequence of spousal murder, and the morally ambivalent status of the troubled husband is effectively ensured beyond the novel’s climactic scene in which the portentous house is consumed by fire. 10. Heroes and Villains (Angela Carter, 1969) In its application to the writings of the British feminist author Angela Carter (1940–92), Gothic criticism has tended to favour the folktale-inflected short story collection The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories (1979). The dystopic, post-apocalyptic narrative of Heroes and Villains, though, is as indebted to the Gothic as it is to science fiction, and it is structured around the haunting of the present by the past in both cultural and psychological terms. Carter’s narrative is underwritten by the academic psychoanalysis fashionable in its day, and imagines a human species divided symbolically by the urges of the id and the intellectualism of the superego. The ghosts of an annihilated culture stalk Carter’s novel in the form of residual social relations, atrophied forms of authority, and lingering patriarchal power. The landscape of a Britain utterly disrupted by a nuclear apocalypse is bleakly sublime, with the supposedly savage protagonists sojourning, variously, in a decaying Tudor mansion and at a faded seaside resort. Gendered violence besets the heroine, whose intellectual integrity is preserved even when her body is violated, her personal qualities raising her above the perverse hero and even more grotesque Gothic Hero-cum-witch-doctor who abduct her from her initial place amongst a residual intellectual elite. This is a work very much of its time, shaped by the cultural change of the 1960s and that decade’s preoccupation with nuclear war. 11. Carrie (Stephen King, 1974) In terms of both productivity and sales, Stephen King (1947–) is a pre-eminent figure in American Gothic. Any of his major fictions might therefore arguably stand in place of Carrie in this list of key fictions within the genre. Carrie, though, is significant for a number

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of reasons – not the least being that it is a work far less derivative of earlier Gothic fictions than are Salem’s Lot (1975), which draws on Dracula (1897), and Pet Sematary (1983), which recalls Frankenstein (1818). Carrie is, further, a novel centred upon a heroine rather than a hero, and if she is beleaguered it is not by a literal male presence. In something of a bildungsroman, the titular Carrie negotiates an uneasy path between the ignorance of her mind and the silent maturing of her body, between her nascent telekinetic powers and the repressive, puritanical Christianity in which she has been raised by an obsessive mother, and between restraint and desire. The narrative is likewise one of persecution: its vision of high-school culture bleakly outlines what may happen to an outsider, and how that excluded figure may ultimately turn with violent intent on those who mock or disdain. Carrie is a work that makes a familiar America truly uncanny. 12. Interview with the Vampire (Anne Rice, 1976) Anne Rice’s (1941–) vampire novel is an important milestone in the development of vampire fiction for several reasons. Crucially, it is the novel through which the so-called ‘sympathetic vampire’ was popularised within modern Gothic. Unlike earlier vampires, this figure was depicted as being ambivalent towards the practice of vampirism, if not regretful regarding the taking of human life. In the novel, indeed, Louis – the vampire who is interviewed – is constantly advanced as a foil to his vampiric creator, Lestat, who adopts a more traditional stance of implacable predation upon humanity. The traditionally central role played by religion is also discarded by Rice: her vampires can enter churches and gaze upon crucifixes with equanimity, and do not appear to believe themselves damned. The terrain of the vampire’s practice is shifted from Europe to the United States, and New Orleans is forwarded as a new locale for Gothic intrigue. Significantly, though Rice’s vampires do not engage in conventional coitus, they do express their relationships – and particularly their same-sex relationships – through a language that is both queer and erotic. The title of Rice’s novel is something of a misnomer: though an interview takes place, the vampire’s words are mediated by a narrator rather than delivered in the first person. This is, though, probably the first vampire novel to allow the un-dead such an extensive opportunity to express the nature of their condition.

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13. Swamp Foetus (Poppy Z. Brite, 1993) Poppy Z. Brite (1967–) is perhaps best known for her radical and queer vampire novel, Lost Souls (1992), published a year before the short story collection Swamp Foetus. The latter sporadically deploys characters from the former, but is an independent volume which in many ways updates the ghost story tradition of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Brite’s stories deal with outsiders – rock and roll musicians, estranged children, incestuous twins, drug users, mixed-race intellectuals, American youths lost in the uncanniness of a western Chinatown. These are fictions, overwhelmingly, of the American South, and as such they convey not merely the heat and decay of the former slave states but also the region’s troubled identity in a modern world that views – or condemns – it as an anachronism. There is much that is both macabre and graphically visceral here – a commune of young men experimenting with drugs, sexuality and necrophilia in an abandoned church; a starved ghost left to protect a pirate treasure; zombies who lack intelligence but who embrace religion; an industrialised and punitive abortion, redolent with misogyny – but there is introspection also. Brite’s characters talk over the horrors they have witnessed, calmly prefacing and rationalising their experience in a modern world which has, for a moment, split open to temporarily reveal chaos. Brite’s work is at its most intense when describing same-sex relationships, though all her characters, irrespective of any specific sexual identity defined in the individual narratives, are essentially queer. 14. Twilight (Stephenie Meyer, 2005) Part of the significant Gothic market denominated as young adult (YA) fiction, Twilight revises many of the conventions of the vampire for a readership markedly different from that associated with un-dead narratives in the nineteenth century. Stephenie Meyer (1973–) depicts vampires who live incongruous and undetected lives in small-town environments, and their communal way of life distances them from the lone predators of earlier fictions. The Cullen clan at the centre of the novel eschew human blood and drink its animal equivalent, a detail which aligns them with the sympathetic vampire of Interview with the Vampire (1976) by Anne Rice

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(1941–). Their relationships further blur the boundaries between vampire and mortal, most notably through the teenage heterosexual relationship at the centre of the narrative, and questions of species loyalty are raised when the vampires face internecine strife with others of their un-dead kind. Though Twilight has been analysed as a representation of teenage issues in the modern world, the work may well convey a more profound reflection upon racialised identity through the interrogation of the relative loyalty due to lovers, family or a greater self-identifying group. The presence of Native American characters within Meyer’s fiction is, in this respect, surely significant. Meyer’s vampires display remarkable physical beauty, an aesthetic that is supplemented further by the tendency of their skin to reflect and refract sunlight. This latter, strangely, has been one of the most controversial elements of Twilight and its epilogues for critics of the genre. 15. Handling the Un-Dead (John Ajvide Lindqvist, 2005) The zombie is ubiquitous in contemporary Gothic. Influenced by US cinema from the 1980s, it has become characteristically rapid in movement and remorseless in its pursuit of human flesh. It is uncanny in its physical resemblance to humanity, but seemingly uncomprehending of any former relationship to those upon whom it predates. A secular monstrosity, the zombie is conventionally a consequence of nature gone awry or of science deployed unethically. In Handling the Un-Dead, John Ajvide Lindqvist (1968–) revises this established consensus of what the zombie is, and reconsiders how the reliving may relate to conventional humanity. The novel is thoroughly European, both in its geographical setting and in the discrete and institutional strategy through which it proposes to contain – literally – the un-dead. Freak conditions in nature, rather than unethical experiments in science, appear to be the cause of the zombie epidemic, and there are sporadic intimations of spirituality throughout the work. The zombie epidemic is not a general one, but affects only the very recently dead, and these return – from graves and mortuary slabs – not as vacuous flesh-eaters but as sad recollections of loved ones whose return is associated with a sort of telepathic empathy. Often the maimed, the young and the elderly, the reliving are sequestered by the state

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in hospitals that resemble refugee camps, and become the subject, variously, of scientific curiosity, political debate and popular (and at times violent) prejudice. The novel is an interrogation of Swedish, if not European, liberal attitudes in an era of mass immigration and cultural upheaval.

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