Resources for the Study of Gothic Literature

[updated July 21, 2008]

I.  Archive of the Primary Texts of Gothic Literature:

• The "Author List" of Jack Voller's The Literary Gothic provides on-line access to the growing number of Gothic titles available on the internet and a fascinating exercise in canon formation.
• Franz Potter's primary Gothic Bibliography of titles from 1764-1834 (under development)

II.  Critical Resources for a Study of Gothic Literature

• "Overviews, Directories, and Collections" of The Literary Gothic
• Fred Frank's Guide to the Gothic III (an important bibliography of recent critical studies)
• "Annotated Bibliography" of The Gothic: Materials for Study (UVa)
• Sublime Anxiety:  The Gothic Family and the Outsider. A wonderful e-version of the UVa Library exhibition that draws from the Sadlier-Black collection, the primary repository of "first Gothics."  Organized by interesting critical themes.
• "What is the Gothic?"  Diane Hoeveler's helpful reflections on this daunting question (scroll down past the course syllabus to find the section to find the “What is the Gothic?” section)
• The International Gothic Association
• A Glossary of Literary Gothic Terms

III.  Theorizing the Gothic (some of the following texts come from The Gothic: Materials for Study, a very useful introduction to and overview of Gothic literature, prepared by graduate students in a course taught by Jerome McGann and Patricia Meyer Spacks of the University of Virginia.)

A.  Contemporary 18th and early 19th century accounts

1. selections from Edmund Burke's A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and
   Beautiful (1759)
2. The Aikins' "On the Pleasure Derived from Objects of Terror" (1773)
3. from Ann Radcliffe's "On the Supernatural in Poetry." The New Monthly Magazine (1826): 145-52.
4. from Marquis de Sade's "Idee sur les Romans," preface to Les Crimes de L'amour (1800).
5. from William Wordsworth's "Preface" to Lyrical Ballads (1800).
6. reactions of the Romantic poets to Gothic literature
7. [ Supernatural Horror in Literature by H.P. Lovecraft (1935). Some insightful reflections on the early Gothics by the 20th century master of "Weird Fiction."]

B.  Political Contextualizing of the Gothic.  A very contested site:  many critics see in gothic terror a reflection and playing out of bourgeois anxiety about the real Terror abroad and the "time of troubles" (see Sade and Wordsworth entries above--also the seminal work of Maurice Levy); others see in the conservative pull of gothic plotting a supreme defense of bourgeois values against forces of repression, superstition, and irrationality.  See Howard's and Thomson's reviews (below) of two recent books on the Gothic for some reflections on this debate.

1. Ronald Paulson, "Gothic Fiction and the French Revolution"
2. Stephen Bernstein, "Form and Ideology in the Gothic Novel"
3. Howard, Jacqueline. "Robert Mighall, A Geography of Victorian Gothic Fiction: Mapping History's Nightmares." Romanticism On the Net 20
4. Thomson, Douglass H. "A Companion to the Gothic. Ed. David Punter." Romanticism On the Net 20 (November 2000)

C.  The Psychology of the Gothic

1. from Freud's "The Uncanny" (1919)
2. from Todorov's The Fantastic (1975)

D.  The Female Gothic

1. The Female Gothic (UVa)
2. Diane Hoeveler's reflections on the female Gothic
3. Women Romantic-Era Writers by Adriana Craciun at the University of London