Though the genre of the Gothic romance clearly owes its name to the subtitle of The Castle of Otranto's second edition, ‘A Gothic Story’, the elevation of Walpole's work to the status of an origin has served to grant an illusory stability to a body of fiction which is distinctly heterogeneous. Face-value readings of the preface to Otranto's second edition have encouraged the idea that Walpole issued a manifesto for a new literary genre, the emergence of which was coincident with a revival of imagination in an era that privileged rationality. As I will argue, however, any categorization of the Gothic as a continuous tradition, with a generic significance, is unable to do justice to the diversity of the romances which are now accommodated under the ‘Gothic’ label, and liable to overlook the often antagonistic relations that existed between different works or writers. The project of this book is to reconsider the so-called Gothic romance from a historical perspective, and to focus in detail on the functioning of specific works, so as to provide the basis for a more nuanced account of the way that the genre was constituted in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

A historically grounded study of Gothic fiction must begin by acknowledging that the genre itself is a relatively modern construct. The Gothic romance as a descriptive category is the product of twentieth-century literary criticism, and specifically of the revival of interest in late-eighteenth-century romance in the 1920s and 1930s.