Gothic fiction

Gothic fiction, sometimes referred to as Gothic horror, is a genre of literature that combines elements of both horror and romance. As a genre, it is generally believed to have been invented by the English author Horace Walpole, with his 1764 novel The Castle of Otranto. The effect of Gothic fiction feeds on a pleasing sort of terror, an extension of Romantic literary pleasures that were relatively new at the time of Walpole's novel. Melodrama and parody (including self-parody) were other long-standing features of the Gothic initiated by Walpole.

Gothic literature is intimately associated with the Gothic Revival architecture of the same era. In a way similar to the gothic revivalists' rejection of the clarity and rationalism of the neoclassical style of the Enlightened Establishment, the literary Gothic embodies an appreciation of the joys of extreme emotion, the thrills of fearfulness and awe inherent in the sublime, and a quest for atmosphere.

The ruins of gothic buildings gave rise to multiple linked emotions by representing the inevitable decay and collapse of human creations—thus the urge to add fake ruins as eyecatchers in English landscape parks. English Gothic writers often associated medieval buildings with what they saw as a dark and terrifying period, characterized by harsh laws enforced by torture, and with mysterious, fantastic, and superstitious rituals. In literature such Anti-Catholicism had a European dimension featuring Roman Catholic excesses such as the Inquisition (in southern European countries such as Italy and Spain).

Prominent features of Gothic fiction include terror (both psychological and physical), mystery, the supernatural, ghosts, haunted houses and Gothic architecture, castles, darkness, death, decay, doubles, madness, secrets, and hereditary curses.

The stock characters of Gothic fiction include tyrants, villains, bandits, maniacs, Byronic heroes, persecuted maidens, femmes fatales, monks, nuns, madwomen, magicians, vampires, werewolves, monsters, demons, dragons, angels, fallen angels, revenants, ghosts, perambulating skeletons, the Wandering Jew and the Devil himself.

The excesses, stereotypes, and frequent absurdities of the traditional Gothic made it rich territory for satire (Skarda 1986). The most famous parody of the Gothic is Jane Austen's novel Northanger Abbey (1818) in which the naive protagonist, after reading too much Gothic fiction, conceives herself a heroine of a Radcliffian romance and imagines murder and villainy on every side, though the truth turns out to be much more prosaic. Jane Austen's novel is valuable for including a list of early Gothic works since known as the Northanger Horrid Novels:

• The Necromancer; or, The Tale of the Black Forest (1794) by 'Ludwig Flammenberg' (pseudonym for Carl Friedrich Kahlert; translated by Peter Teuthold)
• Horrid Mysteries (1796) by the Marquis de Grosse (translated by P. Will)
• The Castle of Wolfenbach (1793) by Eliza Parsons
• The Mysterious Warning, a German Tale (1796) by Eliza Parsons
• Clermont (1798) by Regina Maria Roche
• The Orphan of the Rhine (1798) by Eleanor Sleath
• The Midnight Bell (1798) by Francis Lathom

These books, with their lurid titles, were once thought to be the creations of Jane Austen's imagination, though later research by Michael Sadleir and Montague Summers confirmed that they did actually exist and stimulated renewed interest in the Gothic. They are currently all being reprinted by Valancourt Press (Wright 2007: 29-32).

Another example of Gothic parody in a similar vein is The Heroine by Eaton Stannard Barrett (1813). Cherry Wilkinson, a fatuous female protagonist with a history of novel-reading, fancies herself as the heroine of a Gothic romance. She perceives and models reality according to the stereotypes and typical plot structures of the Gothic novel, leading to a series of absurd events culminating in catastrophe. After her downfall, her affectations and excessive imaginations become eventually subdued by the voice of reason in the form of Stuart, a paternal figure, under whose guidance the protagonist receives a sound education and correction of her misguided taste (Skarda 1986).

Characterized by its castles, dungeons, gloomy forests and hidden passages, from the Gothic novel genre emerged the Female Gothic. Guided by the works of authors such as Ann Radcliffe, Mary Shelley and Charlotte Brontë, the Female Gothic permitted the introduction of feminine societal and sexual desires into Gothic texts. The Medieval society in which Gothic texts are based, granted women writers the opportunity to attribute “features of the mode [of Gothicism] as the result of the suppression of female sexuality, or else as a challenge to the gender hierarchy and values of a male-dominated culture.”^[1]

Significantly, with the development of the Female Gothic came the literary technique of the appropriately coined term, Supernatural Explained. The Supernatural Explained is a recurring plot device in Radcliffe’s The Romance of the Forest. The novel, published in 1791, is among Radcliffe’s earlier works. The novel sets up suspense for horrific events, which all have natural explanations.

An Eighteenth Century response to the novel from the Monthly Review reads: “We must hear no more of enchanted forests and castles, giants, dragons, walls of fire and other ‘monstrous and prodigious things;’ – yet still forests and castles remain, and it is still within the province of fiction, without overstepping the limits of nature, to make use of them for the purpose of creating surprise.” ^[2]

Radcliffe’s use of Supernatural Explained is characteristic of the Gothic author. The female protagonists pursued in these texts are often caught in an unfamiliar and terrifying landscape, delivering higher degrees of horror. The end result, however, is the explained supernatural rather than female terrors, such as rape, incest, ghosts or haunted castles. ^[3]

In Radcliffe’s The Romance of the Forest, one may follow the female protagonist, Adeline, through the forest, hidden passages and abbey dungeons, “without exclaiming, ‘How these antique towers and vacant courts/ chill the suspended soul, till expectation wears the cast of fear!”^[2]

The decision of Female Gothic writers to supplement true supernatural horrors with explained cause and effect transforms romantic plots and Gothic tales into common life and writing. Rather than establish the romantic plot in impossible events Radcliff strays away from writing “merely fables, which no stretch of fancy could realize.”^[4]

English scholar Chloe Chard’s published introduction to The Romance of the Forest refers to the “promised effect of terror.” The outcome, however, “may prove less horrific than the novel has originally suggested.” Radcliffe sets up suspense throughout the course of the novel, insinuating a supernatural or superstitious cause to the mysterious and horrific occurrences of the plot. However, the suspense is relieved with the Supernatural Explained.

For example, Adeline is reading the illegible manuscripts she found in her bedchamber’s secret passage in the abbey when she hears a chilling noise from beyond her doorway. She goes to sleep unsettled, only to awake and learn that what she assumed were haunting spirits, were the domestic voices of the servant, Peter. La Motte, her caretaker in the abbey, recognizes the heights to which her imagination reached after reading the autobiographical manuscripts of a past murdered man in the abbey.

“‘I do not wonder, that after you had suffered its terrors to impress your imagination, you fancied you saw specters, and heard wondrous noises.’ La Motte said.

‘God bless you! Ma’amselle,’ said Peter.

‘I’m sorry I frightened you so last night.’

‘Frightened me,’ said Adeline; ‘how was you concerned in that?’

He then informed her, that when he thought Monsieur and Madame La Motte were asleep, he had stolen to her chamber door… that he had called several times as loudly as he dared, but receiving no answer, he believed she was asleep… This account of the voice she had heard relieved Adeline’s spirits; she was even surprised she did not know it, till remembering the perturbation of her mind for some time preceding, this surprise disappeared.”^[5]

While Adeline is alone in her characteristically Gothic chamber, she detects something supernatural, or mysterious about the setting. However, the “actual sounds that she hears are accounted for by the efforts of the faithful servant to communicate with her, there is still a hint of supernatural in her dream, inspired, it would be seem, by the fact that she is on the spot of her father’s murder and that his unburied skeleton is concealed in the room next hers.”^[6]

The supernatural here is indefinitely explained, but what remains is the “tendency in the human mind to reach out beyond the tangible and the visible; and it is in depicting this mood of vague and half-defined emotion that Mrs. Radcliffe excels.”^[6]

Transmuting the Gothic novel into a comprehendible tale for the imaginative Eighteenth Century woman was useful for the Female Gothic writers of the time. Novels were an experience for these women who had no outlet for a thrilling excursion. Sexual encounters and superstitious fantasies were idle elements of the imagination. However, the use of Female Gothic and Supernatural Explained, are a “good example of how the formula [Gothic novel] changes to suit the interests and needs of its current readers.”

In many respects, the novel’s “current reader” of the time was the woman who “lay down her book with affected indifference, or momentary shame,” ^[7] according to Jane Austen, author of Northanger Abbey. The Gothic novel shaped its form for female readers to “turn to Gothic romances to find support for their own mixed feelings.”^[8]

Following the characteristic Gothic Bildungsroman-like plot sequence, the Female Gothic allowed its readers to graduate from “adolescence to maturity,”^[9] in the face of the realized impossibilities of the supernatural. As female protagonists in novels like Adeline in The Romance of the Forest learn that their superstitious fantasies and terrors are replaced with natural cause and reasonable doubt, the reader may understand the true position of the heroine in the novel:

“The heroine possesses the romantic temperament that perceives strangeness where others see none. Her sensibility, therefore, prevents her from knowing that her true plight is her condition, the disability of being female.”^[9]

Another text in which the heroine of the Gothic Novel encounters the Supernatural Explained is The Castle of Wolfenbach (1793) by gothic author Eliza Parsons. This Female Gothic text by Parsons is listed as one of Catherine Morland's horrid gothic texts in Austen's Northanger Abbey. The heroine in The Castle of Wolfenbach, Matilda, seeks refuge after overhearing a conversation in which her Uncle Weimar speaks of plans to rape her. Matilda finds asylum in the Castle of Wolfenbach: a castle inhabited by old, married caretakers who claim that the second floor is haunted. Matilda, being the courageous heroine, decides to explore the mysterious wing of the Castle.

Bertha, wife of Joseph, (caretakers of the castle) tells Matilda of the "other wing": "Now for goodness sake, dear madam, don't go no farther, for as sure as you are alive, here the ghosts live, for Joseph says he often sees lights and hears strange things." ^[10]

However, as Matilda ventures through the castle, she finds that the wing is not haunted by ghosts and rattling chains, but rather the Countess of Wolfenbach. The Supernatural Explained is revealed ten pages into the novel, and the natural cause of the superstitious noises is a Countess in distress. Characteristic of the Female Gothic, the natural cause of terror is not the supernatural, but rather female disability and societal horrors: rape, incest and the threatening control of the male antagonist.

Further contributions to the Gothic genre were provided in the work of the Romantic poets. Prominent examples include Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Christabel and Keats' La Belle Dame sans Merci (1819) and Isabella, or the Pot of Basil (1820) which feature mysteriously fey ladies (Skarda and Jaffe 1981: 33-5, 132-3). In the latter poem the names of the characters, the dream visions and the macabre physical details are influenced by the novels of premiere Gothicist Anne Radcliffe (Skarda and Jaffe 1981: 132-3). Percy Bysshe Shelley's first published work was the Gothic novel Zastrozzi (1810), about an outlaw obsessed with revenge against his father and half-brother. Shelley published a second Gothic novel in 1811, St. Irvyne; or, The Rosicrucian, about an alchemist who seeks to impart the secret of immortality.

The poetry, romantic adventures and character of Lord Byron, characterised by his spurned lover Lady Caroline Lamb as 'mad, bad and dangerous to know' were another inspiration for the Gothic, providing the archetype of the Byronic hero. Byron features, under the codename of 'Lord Ruthven', in Lady Caroline's own Gothic novel: Glenarvon (1816).

Byron was also the host of the celebrated ghost-story competition involving himself, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Shelley, and John William Polidori at the Villa Diodati on the banks of Lake Geneva in the summer of 1816. This occasion was productive of both Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818) and Polidori's The Vampyre (1819). This latter story revives Lamb's Byronic 'Lord Ruthven', but this time as a vampire. The Vampyre has been accounted by cultural critic Christopher Frayling as one of the most influential works of fiction ever written and spawned a craze for vampire fiction and theatre (and latterly film) which has not ceased to this day. Mary Shelley's novel, though clearly influenced by the gothic tradition, is often considered the first science fiction novel, despite the omission in the novel of any scientific explanation of the monster's animation and the focus instead on the moral issues and consequences of such a creation.

A late example of traditional Gothic is Melmoth the Wanderer (1820) by Charles Maturin which combines themes of Anti-Catholicism with an outcast Byronic hero (Varma 1986).

By the Victorian era Gothic had ceased to be the dominant genre (in fact the form's popularity as an established genre had already begun to erode with the success of the historical romance popularised by Sir Walter Scott). However, in many ways, it was now entering its most creative phase. Recently readers and critics have begun to reconsider a number of previously overlooked Penny Blood or Penny Dreadful serial fictions by such authors such as G.W.M. Reynolds who wrote a trilogy of Gothic horror novels: Faust (1846), Wagner the Wehr-wolf (1847) and The Necromancer (1857) (Baddeley 2002: 143-4). Reynolds was also responsible for The Mysteries of London which has been accorded an important place in the development of the urban as a particularly Victorian Gothic setting, an area within which interesting links can be made with established readings of the work of Dickens and others. Another famous penny dreadful of this era was the anonymously authored Varney the Vampire (1847). The formal relationship between these fictions, serialised for predominantly working class audiences, and the roughly contemporaneous sensation fictions serialised in middle class periodicals is also an area worthy of inquiry.

Influential critics, above all John Ruskin, far from denouncing mediaeval obscurantism, praised the imagination and fantasy exemplified by its gothic architecture, influencing the Pre-Raphaelites.

An important and innovative reinterpreter of the Gothic in this period was Edgar Allan Poe who believed 'that terror is not of Germany, but of the soul'. His story "The Fall of the House of Usher" (1839) explores these 'terrors of the soul' whilst revisiting classic Gothic tropes of aristocratic decay, death, and madness (Skarda and Jaffe 1981: 181-2). The legendary villainy of the Spanish Inquisition, previously explored by Gothicists Radcliffe, Lewis, and Maturin, is revisited in "The Pit and the Pendulum" (1842). The influence of Ann Radcliffe is also detectable in Poe's "The Oval Portrait" (1842), including an honorary mention of her name in the text of the story.

The influence of Byronic Romanticism evident in Poe is also apparent in the work of the Brontë sisters. Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights (1847) transports the Gothic to the forbidding Yorkshire Moors and features ghostly apparitions and a Byronic hero in the person of the demonic Heathcliff whilst Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre (1847) adds the madwoman in the attic (Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar 1979) to the cast of gothic fiction. The Brontës' fiction is seen by some feminist critics as prime examples of Female Gothic, exploring woman's entrapment within domestic space and subjection to patriarchal authority and the transgressive and dangerous attempts to subvert and escape such restriction. Charlotte's Jane Eyre and Emily's Cathy are both examples of female protagonists in such a role (Jackson 1981: 123-29). Louisa May Alcott's gothic potboiler, A Long Fatal Love Chase (written in 1866, but published in 1995) is also an interesting specimen of this subgenre.

Elizabeth Gaskell's tales "The Doom of the Griffiths" (1858) "Lois the Witch", and "The Grey Woman" all employ one of the most common themes of Gothic fiction, the power of ancestral sins to curse future generations, or the fear that they will.

The gloomy villain, forbidding mansion, and persecuted heroine of Sheridan Le Fanu's Uncle Silas (1864) shows the direct influence of both Walpole's Otranto and Radcliffe's Udolpho. Le Fanu's short story collection In a Glass Darkly (1872) includes the superlative vampire tale Carmilla, which provided fresh blood for that particular strand of the Gothic and influenced Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897). According to literary critic Terry Eagleton, Le Fanu, together with his predecessor Maturin and his successor Stoker, form a sub-genre of Irish Gothic, whose stories, featuring castles set in a barren landscape, with a cast of remote aristocrats dominating an atavistic peasantry, represent in allegorical form the political plight of colonial Ireland subjected to the Protestant Ascendancy (Eagleton 1995).

The genre was also a heavy influence on more mainstream writers, such as Charles Dickens, who read gothic novels as a teenager and incorporated their gloomy atmosphere and melodrama into his own works, shifting them to a more modern period and an urban setting, including Oliver Twist (1837-8), Bleak House (1854) (Mighall 2003) and Great Expectations (1860–61). These pointed to the juxtaposition of wealthy, ordered and affluent civilisation next to the disorder and barbarity of the poor within the same metropolis. Bleak House in particular is credited with seeing the introduction of urban fog to the novel, which would become a frequent characteristic of urban Gothic literature and film (Mighall 2007). His most explicitly Gothic work is his last novel The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870). The mood and themes of the gothic novel held a particular fascination for the Victorians, with their morbid obsession with mourning rituals, Mementos, and mortality in general.

The 1880s, saw the revival of the Gothic as a powerful literary form allied to "fin de siecle" decadence, which fictionalized contemporary fears like ethical degeneration and questioned the social structures of the time. Classic works of this Urban Gothic include Robert Louis Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), George du Maurier's Trilby (1894), Richard Marsh's The Beetle: A Mystery (1897), Henry James' The Turn of the Screw (1898), and the stories of Arthur Machen. The most famous gothic villain ever, Count Dracula was created by Bram Stoker in his novel Dracula (1897). Stoker's book also established Transylvania and Eastern Europe as the locus classicus of the Gothic (Mighall 2003).

In America, two notable writers of the end of the 19th century, in the Gothic tradition, were Ambrose Bierce and Robert W. Chambers. Bierce's short stories were in the horrific and pessimistic tradition of Poe. Chambers, though, indulged in the decadent style of Wilde and Machen (even to the extent of having a character named 'Wilde' in his The King in Yellow).

Notable English twentieth century writers in the Gothic tradition include Algernon Blackwood, William Hope Hodgson, M. R. James, Hugh Walpole, and Marjorie Bowen. In America pulp magazines such as Weird Tales reprinted classic Gothic horror tales from the previous century, by such authors as Poe, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Edward Bulwer-Lytton and printed new stories by modern authors featuring both traditional and new horrors (Goulart 1986). The most significant of these was H. P. Lovecraft who also wrote an excellent conspectus of the Gothic and supernatural horror tradition in his Supernatural Horror in Literature (1936) as well as developing a Mythos that would influence Gothic and contemporary horror well into the 21st century. Lovecraft's protégé, Robert Bloch, contributed to Weird Tales and penned Psycho (1959), which drew on the classic interests of the genre. From these, the gothic genre per se gave way to modern horror fiction, regarded by some literary critics as a branch of the Gothic (Wisker 2005: 232-33) although others use the term to cover the entire genre. Many modern writers of horror (or indeed other types of fiction) exhibit considerable gothic sensibilities—examples include the works of Anne Rice, as well as some of the sensationalist works of Stephen King (Skarda and Jaffe 1981: 464-5, 478; Davenport-Hines 1998: 357-8). Romantic strand of Gothic was taken up in Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca (1938) which is in many respects a reworking of Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre. Other books by du Maurier, such as Jamaica Inn (1936), also display Gothic tendencies. Du Maurier's work inspired a substantial body of 'Female Gothics,' concerning heroines alternately swooning over or being terrified by scowling Byronic men in possession of acres of prime real estate and the appertaining droit de seigneur [2].

Gothic Romances of this description became popular during the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, with authors such as Phyllis A. Whitney, Joan Aiken, Dorothy Eden, Victoria Holt, Barbara Michaels, Mary Stewart, and Jill Tattersall. Many featured covers depicting a terror-stricken woman in diaphanous attire in front of a gloomy castle. Many were published under the Paperback Library Gothic imprint and were marketed to a female audience. Though the authors were mostly women, some men wrote gothic romances under female pseudonyms. For instance the prolific Clarissa Ross and Marilyn Ross were pseudonyms for the male writer Dan Ross and Frank Belknap Long published Gothics under his wife's name, Lyda Belknap Long. Another example is British writer Peter O'Donnell, who wrote under the pseudonym Madeleine Brent. Outside of companies like Lovespell, who carry Colleen Shannon, very few books seem to be published using the term today.

The genre also influenced American writing to create the Southern Gothic genre, which combines some Gothic sensibilities (such as the Grotesque) with the setting and style of the Southern United States . Examples include William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Harper Lee, and Flannery O'Connor (Skarda and Jaffe 1981: 418-56). Contemporary American writers in this tradition include Joyce Carol Oates, in such novels as Bellefleur and A Bloodsmoor Romance and short story collections such as Night-Side (Skarda 1986b) and Raymond Kennedy in his novel Lulu Incognito. The Southern Ontario Gothic applies a similar sensibility to a Canadian cultural context. Robertson Davies, Alice Munro, Barbara Gowdy, and Margaret Atwood have all produced works that are notable exemplars of this form. Another writer in this tradition was Henry Farrell whose best-known work was the Hollywood horror novel What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1960). Farrel's novels spawned a sub-genre of 'Grande Dame Guignol' in the cinema, dubbed the 'Psycho-biddy' genre.

Other notable contemporary writers in the Gothic tradition are: Susan Hill, author of The Woman in Black (1983); Patrick McGrath, author of The Grotesque (1989); Poppy Z. Brite, author of Lost Souls (1992) and Exquisite Corpse (1996); Caitlin Kiernan author of Silk (1998) (Davenport-Hines 1998: 377-8; Baddeley 2002: 84-7), romanian Oliviu Craznic, author of ...si la sfarsit a mai ramas cosmarul (...And then the nightmare came at last - novel).

The themes of the literary Gothic have been translated into other media such as the theatre and had a notable revival in twentieth century gothic horror films such the classic Universal Horror films of the 1930s, Hammer Horror, and Roger Corman's Poe cycle (Davenport-Hines 1998: 355-8). Twentieth century rock and roll music also had its gothic side. Black Sabbath's 1969 debut album created a dark sound different from other bands at the time and has been called the first ever "Goth-rock" record (Baddeley 2002: 264). Themes from gothic writers such as H. P. Lovecraft were also used among gothic rock and heavy metal bands, especially in black metal, thrash metal (Metallica's The Call of Ktulu), death metal, and gothic metal. For example, heavy metal musician King Diamond delights in telling stories full of horror, theatricality, satanism and anti-Catholicism in his compositions (Baddeley 2002: 265). In Hindi cinema, the gothic tradition was combined with aspects of Indian culture, particularly reincarnation, to give rise to an "Indian gothic" genre, beginning with the films Mahal (1949) and Madhumati (1958).^[11]

• Nightmare Abbey (1818) by Thomas Love Peacock (Full text at Project Gutenberg)
• The Ingoldsby Legends (1840) by Thomas Ingoldsby (Full text at The Ex-Classics Website)

• American Gothic Fiction
• Dark romanticism
• Suburban Gothic
• Southern Ontario Gothic
• Tasmanian Gothic
• Gothic Blue Books
• List of Gothic Fiction works

• Baddeley, Gavin, (2002) Goth Chic. London, Plexus.
• Birkhead, Edith (1921). The Tale of Terror.
• Bloom, Clive (2007). Gothic Horror: A Guide for Students and Readers. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
• Botting, Fred (1996). Gothic, Routledge.
• Brown, Marshall (2005). The Gothic Text. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP.
• Clery, E.J. (1995). The Rise of Supernatural Fiction, Cambridge UP.
• Davenport-Hines, Richard (1998) Gothic: 400 Years of Excess, Horror, Evil and Ruin. London, Fourth Estate.
• Eagleton, Terry (1995). Heathcliff and the Great Hunger. NY: Verso.
• Fuchs, Barbara, (2004), Romance, London: Routledge.
• Gamer, Michael, (2006), Romanticism and the Gothic. Genre, Reception and Canon Formation, Cambridge UP.
• Gibbons, Luke, (2004), Gaelic Gothic. Galway: Arlen House.
• Gilbert, Sandra and Susan Gubar (1979). The Madwoman in the Attic. ISBN 0-300-08458-7
• Goulart, Ron (1986) "The Pulps" in Jack Sullivan (ed) The Penguin Encyclopedia of Horror and the Supernatural: 337-40.
• Grigorescu, George (2007) . Long Journey Inside The Flesh. Bucharest, Romania ISBN978-0-8059-8468-2
• Hadji, Robert (1986) "Jean Ray" in The Penguin Encyclopedia of Horror and the Supernatural edited by Jack Sullivan.
• Haggerty, George (2006). Queer Gothic. Urbana, IL: Illinois UP
• Halberstam, Judith (1995). Skin Shows. Durham, NC: Duke UP.
• Horner, Avril & Sue Zlosnik (2005). Gothic and the Comic Turn. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
• Jackson, Rosemary (1981). Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion.
• Kilgour, Maggie, (1995). The Rise of the Gothic Novel, Routledge.
• Medina, Antoinette, (2007). A Vampires Vedas.
• Mighall, Robert, (2003), A Geography of Victorian Gothic Fiction: Mapping History's Nightmares, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Mighall, Robert, (2007), "Gothic Cities", in C. Spooner and E. McEvoy, eds, The Routledge Companion to Gothic, London: Routledge, pp. 54–72.
• Punter, David, (1996), The Literature of Terror (2 vols).
• Punter, David, (2004), The Gothic, London: Wiley-Blackwell.
• Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky (1986). The Coherence of Gothic Conventions. NY: Methuen.
• Skarda, Patricia L., and Jaffe, Norma Crow (1981) Evil Image: Two Centuries of Gothic Short Fiction and Poetry. New York, Meridian.
• Skarda, Patricia, (1986) "Gothic Parodies" in Jack Sullivan ed. (1986) The Penguin Encyclopedia of Horror and the Supernatural: 178-9.
• Skarda, Patricia, (1986b) "Oates, Joyce Carol" in Jack Sullivan ed. (1986) The Penguin Encyclopedia of Horror and the Supernatural: 303-4.
• Stevens, David (2000). The Gothic Tradition. ISBN 0-521-77732-1
• Sullivan, Jack, ed. (1986). The Penguin Encyclopedia of Horror and the Supernatural.
• Summers, Montague (1938). Gothic Quest.
• Varma, Devendra (1957). The Gothic Flame.
• Varma, Devendra, (1986) "Maturin, Charles Robert" in Jack Sullivan (ed) The Penguin Encyclopedia of Horror and the Supernatural: 285-6.
• Wisker, Gina (2005). Horror Fiction: An Introduction. Continuum: New York.
• Wright, Angela (2007). Gothic Fiction. Basingstoke: Palgrave.

• CALIGARI - German Journal of Horror Studies
• Gothic Poets and Writers Literary Club
• The Gothic Literature Page by Zittaw Press
• Gothic Fiction Bookshelf at Project Gutenberg
• Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies
• Literary Gothic: A Web Guide to Gothic Literature
• "Typical Elements of American Gothic Fiction"
• House of Pain E-Zine Archives: Modern Gothic Fiction
• Gothic Author Biographies
• The Sickly Taper: A Gothic bibliography on the web