Chapter Five focusses on another popular literary discourse, the Gothic, which emerged in the middle of the century and has sometimes been seen as a negative form of the sublime. Wright argues that it fuses various national and generic sources, troubling cultural boundaries and playing an important role in the development of Romantic literature despite its ‘terroristic’ association. Originating in European romance, the literary Gothic circulated around the continent via translations and free adaptations, making it difficult to identify specific sources. Walpole’s Castle of Otranto and Beckford’s Vathek, for example, rely on a combination of often unattributed British and French texts, whereas Ann Radcliffe’s European reception shows the permeability of cultural boundaries and reveals a community of tastes bridging the Channel. Wright then discusses French and especially German Gothic works, which became increasingly popular during the French Revolution, including The Book of Spectres, which indirectly influenced the age’s best-known Gothic romance, Frankenstein. As the author shows, the Gothic fostered communities of readers that transcended national borders, escaping the nationalist labels reviewers had attributed as a way of dismissing the genre, and making it truly cosmopolitan despite its local differences.

This chapter offers a contemplation on the symbiotic nature and interdependencies of the later works of Ann Radcliffe and Matthew Lewis, and their consequent reputations in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Beginning with an account of how the critical tradition has tended to conceptualise the Radcliffe/ Lewis relation, the chapter focuses in upon a range of contemporary readerships that chose to read, compare and mention in the same breath the works of both authors, often without drawing any aesthetic differences between them.

Written by the editors, this essay provides an Introduction to all three volumes of The Cambridge History of the Gothic. It proceeds by casting a self-reflexive glance at the notion of ‘history’ as it is represented in Gothic writing itself, arguing that, since its inception in the eighteenth century, Gothic has always occupied a fraught and complex position in relation to the practice of formal and official historiography. Second, it provides an overview of the volumes to follow, foregrounding the ways in which the essays brought together here, more than simply offering a rigorous ‘history’ of the Gothic, are preoccupied with the ways in which the Gothic has responded to, and been inscribed within, some of the determining historical events of Western civilisation, from the Sacking of Rome in AD 410 to the twenty-first century.

This chapter surveys the literary achievements of the group of writers who gathered together on the banks of Lake Geneva in the Summer of 1816: Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley; Percy Bysshe Shelley; John Polidori; and Lord Byron. Beginning with the famous ghost storytelling competition proposed by Byron, it considers the extent to which Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, while located in the earlier tradition of Radcliffean romance, forged new directions for the Gothic mode through its graphic realisation of corporeal and textual monstrosity. While it forces us to reconsider notions of origin and influence among the group, Polidori’s The Vampyre, the chapter argues, bequeathed to the Gothic its own ‘monstrous progeny’. Engaging with, and thoroughly revising, the earlier poetry of William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Percy Shelley and Byron, for their part, set in place some of the distinctive features of second-generation Romanticism, even if the works that they produced during this period force us to interrogate the critical distinction between the ‘Romantic’ and the ‘Gothic’ itself.