Kategoria BISAC: Literary Criticism >> Gothic & Romance

As evidenced by the vampires, werewolves, and other frights overrunning the best-seller lists, the Gothic remains immensely popular. This collection of essays traces the roots of the Gothic to an unexpected source: eighteenth-century interpretations of Shakespeare. Through close attention to literary, cultural, and historical detail, the contributors demonstrate that even as Shakespeare was being established as the supreme British writer, he was also being cited as justification for early Gothic writers abandonment of literary decorum and their interest in the supernatural."

What does hospitality have to do with Romanticism? What are the conditions of a Romantic welcome? Romantic Hospitality and the Resistance to Accommodation traces the curious passage of strangers through representative texts of English Romanticism, while also considering some European philosophical "pre-texts" of this tradition. From Rousseau's invocation of the cot-less Carib to Coleridge's reception of his Porlockian caller, Romanticisms encounters with the "strange" remind us that the hospitable relation between subject and Other is invariably fraught with problems.

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This volume, which weds a socio-historical and intellectual approach to classic British Gothic literature, is a perfect introduction to the genre for the student and lay reader alike. Works by gothic authors such as Horace Walpole, Matthew Lewis, Ann Radcliffe, William Godwin, and Mary Shelley, as well as traditions like the Female Gothic, are examined against the backdrop of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British political and cultural developments, culminating in a detailed and accessible exploration of the gothic s major motifs and themes."

"Republicanism and the American Gothic" offers a comparative study of British and American literature and culture in the 1790s and 1950s, as it recontextualizes American gothic fiction from the perspective of the cold war. Exploring the republican tradition of the British Enlightenment and the effect of its translation and migration to the American colonies, Marilyn Michaud pays particular attention to the transatlantic influence of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century libertarian and anti-authoritarian thought on British and American revolutionary culture.

This study describes a variety of ways of thinking about place in the Renaissance and in Paradise Lost. Despite coming from different perspectives, they have in common the idea that the difficulty of the relationship of reciprocity that poetic subjects often expect from their environment destabilizes those subjects' understanding, not only of environment, but of themselves.

The study explores destabilization as it affects aspects of the poem from Adam's sense of the landscape of Eden and the meaning of the Fall itself, to the relationship the ambiguous landscapes of...

Defining the American gothic tradition both within the context of the major movements of intellectual history over the past three-hundred years, as well as within the issues critical to American culture, this comprehensive volume covers a diverse terrain of well-known American writers, from Poe to Faulkner to Toni Morrison and Cormac McCarthy. Charles L. Crow demonstrates how the gothic provides a forum for discussing key issues of changing American culture, explores forbidden subjects, and provides a voice for the repressed and silenced.