Anthem Studies in Gothic Literature

Theology in the Early British and Irish Gothic, 1764–1834 reassesses the relationship between contemporary theology and the Gothic. Investigating Gothic aesthetics, depictions of the supernatural and portrayals of religious organisations, it explores how the Gothic engages with contemporary theologies, both Dissenting and Anglican.

The Gothic Literature and History of New England surveys the origin, nature and future of the Gothic mode in New England’s history and literature, from the Puritans to the present, showing how the legacy of religious intolerance, racism and misogyny haunts fiction, film and popular culture.

While the United States celebrates the 250th anniversary of its founding, this timely book considers a darker legacy of the Declaration of Independence. Focusing on the work of three antebellum Philadelphia gothic writers, the author identifies a literary mode she calls “civic horror” and examines its relevance to U.S. politics today.

This innovative and interdisciplinary collection of essays considers examples of monstrous children since the 16th century to the present, spanning real-life and popular culture, to exhibit the manifestation of the Western cultural anxiety around the problematic, anomalous child as naughty, dangerous, or just plain evil.

Taxidermy and the Gothic: The Horror of Still Life is the first extended study of the Gothic’s collusion with taxidermy. Focusing on contemporary cultural and material texts, it shows how taxidermy’s imbrication with Gothic horror is more than skin deep: these are rich discourses stuffed by affinities for corporeal transgressions, the uncanny, and the counterfeit.

The monograph gives an overview of the development and characteristic features of Swedish Gothic from the Romantic age until today. 

Originally published in 1860, the formative Gothic novel by Harriet Prescott Spofford (1835–1921), one of nineteenth-century America’s most significant woman writers, relates the tale of a tormented British aristocrat who struggles to retain his sanity while suffering horrifying visitations from the spectre of his dead lover amid the agonies of an already fragile mind.

This monograph examines the centrality of dreams and their significant transformations in British Gothic novels and in Caribbean novels. The Gothic counters the Enlightenment’s internalization of dreams by reimagining dreams as social and political phenomena. They subsequently play vital roles in responding to profound questions concerning revolution and empire.

Nuclear Gothic investigates the previously unexplored congruities that lie between gothic forms and modes and nuclear cultures and techno-sciences; it aims to read Western nuclear fictions in relation to their Japanese counterparts and through a cohesive critical framework that examines atomic processes, nuclear fictions and specific historical and cultural moments.

In late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century British literature, Scandinavia emerged as a setting for Gothic terror. This book explores the extensive use of Nordic superstition as it provided a vocabulary for Gothic texts, examining the cultural significance these references held for writers exploring Britain’s northern heritage.

Twelve uncanny tales of the race-haunted nineteenth-century South, by authors both celebrated and obscure, are presented along with background readings, themselves often chilling, placing the tales in a historical context.

‘Neo-Gothic Narratives’ defines and theorises what mobilises the employment of the Gothic to speak to our own times.