This edited collection examines Gothic works written by women authors in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, with a specific focus on the novels and chapbooks produced by less widely commercially and critically popular writers. Bringing these authors to the forefront of contemporary critical examinations of the Gothic, chapters in this collection examine how these works impacted the development of 'women's writing' and Gothic writing during this time.0Offering readers an original look at the literary landscape of the period and the roles of the creative women who defined it, the collection argues that such works reflected a female-centred literary subculture defined by creative exchange and innovation, one that still shapes perceptions of the Gothic mode today. This collection, then, presents an alternative understanding of the legacy of women Gothic authors, anchoring this understanding in complex historical and social contexts and providing a new world of Gothic literature for readers to explore.

This edited collection examines Gothic works written by women authors in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, with a specific focus on the novels and chapbooks produced by less widely commercially and critically popular writers. Bringing these authors to the forefront of contemporary critical examinations of the Gothic, chapters in this collection examine how these works impacted the development of ‘women’s writing’ and Gothic writing during this time. Offering readers an original look at the literary landscape of the period and the roles of the creative women who defined it, the collection argues that such works reflected a female-centred literary subculture defined by creative exchange and innovation, one that still shapes perceptions of the Gothic mode today. This collection, then, presents an alternative understanding of the legacy of women Gothic authors, anchoring this understanding in complex historical and social contexts and providing a new world of Gothic literature for readers to explore.

Mary Charlton's 1799 Rosella, or Modern Occurrences is a fascinating novel that brokers between conservative and feminist ideas, humour and horror, and indulgence in and ridicule of sentimental tropes. Written in imitation of Cervantes’s Don Quixote (1615) and Lennox’s The Female Quixote (1752), Rosella belongs to a large class of comic works in which female readers and novelists are satirized. This edition not only addresses the gap in knowledge about Charlton’s work, but will be of particular interest to scholars working on the Romantic literary market of the 1790s, especially Minerva Press publications. The book engages with many of the themes explored in eighteenth-century and Romantic literature, from women’s writing and female education to popular fiction and sensibility. Accompanied by a new introduction by Professor Natalie Neill, this title will be of great interest to students and scholars of literary history.

Religious Horror and the Ecogothic explores the intersections of Anglophone Christianity and the Ecogothic, a subgenre that explores the ecocritical in Gothic literature, film, and media. Acknowledging the impact of Christian ideologies upon interpretations of human relationships with the environment, the Ecogothic in turn interrogates spiritual identity and humanity’s darker impulses in relation to ecological systems. Through a survey of Ecogothic texts from the eighteenth century to the present day, this book illuminates the ways in which a Christianized understanding of hierarchy, dominion, fear, and sublimity shapes reactions to the environment and conceptions of humanity’s place therein. It interrogates the discourses which inform environmental policy, as well as definitions of the “human” in a rapidly changing world.

Jane Austen's ironic reference to 'the trash with which the press now groans' is only one of innumerable Romantic complaints about fiction's newly overwhelming presence. This book draws on evidence from over one hundred Romantic novels to explore the changes in publishing, reviewing, reading, and writing that accompanied the unprecedented growth in novel publication during the Romantic period. With particular focus on the infamous Minerva Press, the most prolific fiction-producer of the age, Hannah Hudson puts its popular authors in dialogue with writers such as Walter Scott, Ann Radcliffe, Maria Edgeworth, and William Godwin. Using paratextual materials including reviews, advertisements, and authorial prefaces, this book establishes the ubiquity of Romantic anxieties about literary 'excess', showing how beliefs about fictional overproduction created new literary hierarchies. Ultimately, Hudson argues that this so-called excess was a driving force in fictional experimentation and the advertising and publication practices that shaped the genre's reception. This title is part of the Flip it Open Programme and may also be available Open Access. Check our website Cambridge Core for details.

The Gothic World offers an overview of this popular field whilst also extending critical debate in exciting new directions such as film, politics, fashion, architecture, fine art and cyberculture. Structured around the principles of time, space and practice, and including a detailed general introduction, the five sections look at: Gothic Histories Gothic Spaces Gothic Readers and Writers Gothic Spectacle Contemporary Impulses. The Gothic World seeks to account for the Gothic as a multi-faceted, multi-dimensional force, as a style, an aesthetic experience and a mode of cultural expression that traverses genres, forms, media, disciplines and national boundaries and creates, indeed, its own ‘World’.

 American Gothic literature inherited many time-worn tropes from its English Gothic precursor, along with a core preoccupation: anxiety about power and property. Yet the transatlantic journey left its mark on the genre—the English ghostly setting becomes the wilderness haunted by spectral Indians. The aristocratic villain is replaced by the striving, independent young man. The dispossession of Native Americans and African Americans adds urgency to traditional Gothic anxieties about possession. The unchanging role of woman in early Gothic narratives parallels the status of American women, even after the Revolution. Twentieth-century Gothic works offer inclusion to previously silent voices, including immigrant writers with their own cultural traditions. The 21st century unleashes the zombie horde—the latest incarnation of the voracious American.