As a literature fixated on uncanny disruptions to a seemingly stable order, it is more than ironic that the German Schauerroman has itself been widely ignored, perhaps even suppressed, by literary historians over the years. From the outset German literature occupied something of a privileged, albeit vilified position within the transnational framework of the gothic on the emerging literary market around 1800. For earliest critics in Britain such as Jane Austen or the Anti-Jacobin, gothic fiction was synonymous with an image of Germany as the depraved site of necromancy, secret societies, and wanton violence. When Austen completed Northanger Abbey in 1798, her parody of gothic novels contained not only Karl Friedrich Kahlert's The Necromancer and Karl Grosse's Horrid Mysteries (original titles: Der Geisterbanner and Der Genius), her list of “horrid novels” extended to English works obviously hoping to profit from the German influx: Francis Lathom's supposed “German Story Founded on Incidents of Real Life” The Midnight Bell and Eliza Parsons's “German Story” Castle of Wolfenbach and her “German Tale” The Mysterious Warning.