"Art of Darkness" is an ambitious attempt to describe the principles governing Gothic literature. Ranging across five centuries of fiction, drama, and verse including tales as diverse as Horace Walpole's "The Castle of Otranto," Shelley's "Frankenstein," Coleridge's "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner," and Freud's "The Mysteries of Enlightenment" Anne Williams proposes three new premises: that Gothic is "poetic," not novelistic, in nature; that there are two parallel Gothic traditions, Male and Female; and that the Gothic and the Romantic represent a single literary tradition.
Building on...