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In the Gothic, nothing stays buried for long. Since its inception in the mid-eighteenth century, the Gothic imagination has been concerned with the pasts of the societies from which it emerged. This collection, featuring contributions from archivists, historians and literary critics, examines how horror fiction and the wider Gothic mode have engaged with the constructed conception of "history".
From Victorian nightmares of Jurassic jungles to ghost stories on the contemporary stage, the contributors adopt varied and innovative approaches to consider how the Gothic has created, complicated and sometimes subverted historical narratives. In doing so, these works blur the distinctions between the "historical record" and creative endeavour, undermine linear and sequential understandings of the progress of time and dissolve temporal boundaries. The collection explores a variety of Gothic forms including drama, poetry, prose, illustration, film and folklore, and it draws on classic texts such as Wuthering Heights and Dracula, as well as less familiar works, including Reynolds' The Mysteries of London and Baldini's Mal'aria.
Literature, the Gothic and the Reconstruction of History will be invaluable to students and scholars interested in the confluences of literary and historical endeavour, the creation and depiction of historical constructs in popular culture, and Gothic horror in its myriad forms.
List of contents
Introduction - Neil Cocks and Daniel Renshaw; Part I. The Prehuman and Prehistoric; 1. Gothic Nightmares of Prehistory: How the Victorian Imagination Gave Birth to Dinosaurs as We Know Them; 2. Natural History vs. Human History: The Scary Return of the Past in Fortitude; Part II. The Medieval and the Early Modern; 3. "'Tis a fearful height!": Temporal and Physical Vertigo in Eighteenth-Century Gothic Plays; 4. "Embodied, to the eye of Fear": Affective Encounters and Antiquarian Mediation in Anne Bannerman's Tales of Superstition and Chivalry; 5. An Inheritance of Witches: William Harrison Ainsworth's Uses of the Medieval in The Lancashire Witches; 6. Winterson's Witches: A Reappraisal and Reclamation of the Abject; Part III. The Long Nineteenth Century; 7. Human Remains and/in Gothic Nightmares: Revisiting the Past?; 8. "The Pretence of Civilisation": Gothic Progress in G. W. M. Reynolds's The Mysteries of London; 9. The Gothic Nature of Archives and the Work of M.R James and Henry James; 10. Transnational Gothic Histories and the Migrant Experience in Britain; Part IV. The Modern; 11. The Haunting of the Past in Contemporary Italian Gothic Fiction; 12. History, Haunting through the Layers in Contemporary Staged Ghost Stories; 13. "The Historical Text as Literary Artifact", or Reading History as Gothic: Identity, Event, Time; Index
About the author
Daniel Renshaw is Lecturer in Modern History in the Department of History at the University of Reading, UK. His research focuses on migration, diaspora, prejudice and identity in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Neil Cocks is Associate Professor in the Department of English Literature at the University of Reading, UK. He has published widely on subjects as diverse as Victorian literature, children's literature, Ayn Rand, critical university studies, film theory and the Gothic.
Summary
Literature, the Gothic and the Reconstruction of History, made up of contributions from archivists, historians and literary critics, examines how horror fiction and the wider Gothic mode have engaged with the constructed conception of “history”.
