The Gothic text

by Brown, Marshall

"The Gothic Text offers an innovative account of a much-studied mode. It combines the teleological approach to literary history developed in the author's Preromanticism with a European perspective on the one truly international literary form of its era. New insights into literary history and the history of ideas provide a framework for innovative close readings that approach classics of the genre from unusual angles. Accessibly written and argued in careful, lively detail, The Gothic Text includes extended readings of Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto, Ann Radcliffe's The Italian, and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, among others, along with a fresh survey of theatrical precursors to the gothic and a thoroughly researched study of the psychology of consciousness that developed out of Kant's idealist philosophy toward a gothic sensibility. The Gothic Text will give many new impulses to the study of romanticism, nineteenth-century fiction, and the origins of psychoanalysis."--Jacket.