The shape of Ann Radcliffe's career, culminating in The Mysteries of Udolpho, is towards the creation of a narrative structure and a narrative method. Here, a feminine subject is 'haunted' by a phantom bearing witness to the buried secrets of the father. The most compelling attempt to historicize the shift in readerly sensibility noted by David H. Richter is found in Terry Castle's brilliant essay 'The Spectralization of the Other in The Mysteries of Udolpho'. Syndy M. Conger helpfully sums up the drift of Richter's argument. 'German scholars have begun to explore ways in which Empfindsamkeit offered powerless citizens living under despotism an alternate interior realm in which to exercise power, over themselves: the experience of fulfilment in self-fulfilment'. Richter's exemplary figure is the 'unguarded door': the Gothic protagonist suddenly finds an unopposed egress from an apparently fast prison.

The Castle of Otranto and The Old English Baron are 'genealogical' texts concerned with the assertion of dynastic claims. Both plots revolve around murder, usurpation and restitution. In each, a young man of questionable pedigree establishes the legitimacy of his claims to his 'house', a process historically authenticated through the ostensible provenance of the text. It is over the equation between descent and authority that they mainly differ, The Old English Baron seeking to eliminate questions scandalously posed by The Castle of Otranto. From The Castle of Otranto to The Scarlet Letter, Gothic texts insist on the historical residue that authenticates their truth. These two aspects of genealogy are endemic in the Romance genre. In Romance, the usurped and dispossessed find their rights restored; the lost are found, and a true genealogy reasserts itself. It is a Romance convention to locate the story in some historically true narrative.

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book aims to make available a body of texts connected with the cultural phenomenon known as Gothic writing. Some of the texts document the ideological and aesthetic environment which gave rise to the new form of writing; its conditions of possibility. The book includes many of the critical writings and reviews which helped to constitute Gothic as a distinct genre, by revisions of the standards of taste, by critique and by outright attack. It covers the period from 1700-1820 of the Gothic vogue to the mid nineteenth century. The book contains a number of the standard references in any history of the genre, which it would be perverse to exclude. It includes extracts from Tacitus and Montesquieu, the authorities eighteenth-century commentators most often referred to.

Best known of the five long tales of Sheridan Le Fanu which make up In a Glass Darkly is 'Carmilla'. The tale is a covert account of lesbianism, lusciously filmed with Ingrid Pitt and Kate O'Mara under the title The Vampire Lovers. Even so exotic a collection as In a Glass Darkly, with its German-writing exegete-behind-the-narrator and its continental locations, includes a sharp delineation of Georgian Dublin in The Familiar. 'German Ghosts and Ghost Seers' is likely one of Le Fanu's earliest sources for the doctrines of Emanuel Swedenborg. The ghostly Ferris must be treated as an influence upon the author of Uncle Silas and In a Glass Darkly. The stories of In a Glass Darkly arise, in several ways, from Dr Martin Hesselius's archive, and the variety of narrative-perspectives adopted in turn complicates the much-mediated relation between reader and character.

Charles Robert Maturin's second novel, The wild Irish boy, is very much aware of its ghostly inheritance. This chapter examines Maturin's novel as something more than a mere 'opportunistic imitation' of Sydney Owenson. In The wild Irish boy, Maturin produces a conglomerate novel, an intriguing mixture of society novel, national tale, Gothic novel, and early stirrings of both the Silver Fork novel and the roman a clef. This attests to and underlines the fractured nature of contemporary Irish fiction and society. Maturin's inclusion of a 'The wild Irish girl' costume further comments on Owenson's well-documented habit of appearing in public dressed as Glorvina and performing as her famous Irish princess. The heavy intertextuality of Maturin's novel, including its references to Owenson and The wild Irish girl, participate in a specific act of masculinisation undertaken by a 'purposeful borrowing from, resistance to, and remaking of, female-authored models'.

This chapter traces the genealogy of a particular strand, the 'Gothic aesthetic', where a chivalric past was idealized at the explicit expense of a classical present. It deals with a Foucauldian genealogy dealing in the descent of discourses which inform Gothic writing. The Gothic aesthetic declares its discursive nature through its claims to know proper writing, writing as it ought to be. The Letters on Chivalry and Romance may have been read as a manifesto for the Gothic romance, but the essays reveal the discursive tensions underlying the Gothic aesthetic. The pedagogic consequences of ideal presence in the Gothic aesthetic are evident in Clara Reeve's The Progress of Romance. In the Gothic pastoral, the primitivist ideal projected onto the past is always stalked by its shadow, its dark opposite.

Northanger Abbey is interesting because it represents the endeavour of a particularly alert consciousness to reduce the Gothic to burlesque, to satire, to a univocal status. It attempts to rescue Ann Radcliffe from the 'horrids', reading her as a 'proto-novelist'. The dominant tone of Northanger Abbey is playful, deftly ironic, sounding serious issues with a light touch. As a work of anti-Gothic, Northanger Abbey has an unavoidable interest for the Gothic genealogist. As with Gothic works, Northanger Abbey has a tendency towards the carnivalesque. It retains a Gothic core when it keeps the conflict between General Tilney's devotion to the values of alliance, and his children's to those of romantic love. Northanger Abbey's narrative of personal development, its cult of 'personality', is ruffled by the disjunctive energies of the Gothic world it seeks to put by, as childish things; there are too many loose ends.

The conventional ghost-story attention to footsteps on the staircase is inverted and intensified; the legacy of Sheridan Le Fanu is adapted to the spiritual conditions of systematic bereavement and impersonalised killing. The horror of the blitz was the absence of weapons: people fell down dead, killed either by explosions of air or by the components of their dwellings. This chapter discusses the notion that, under the blitz, Londoners came together in an amalgamating way, people wishing to be a people in some tribal and bond-reinforcing way. The indefinite article attempts to inscribe this wish, but visibly relies on italic emphasis. Other images for the condition either reflect the earlier Wordsworthian allusion to earth's dense maintenance of the dead or repeat a feature of Stella Rodney and Robert Kelway's earlier union.

This chapter focuses on two personae in the Victorian period as having particular relevance for Gothic fiction: the dandy and the cross-dressed or 'manly' woman. It explores the twentieth-century understanding of the relationship between dandies and freaks. Dandyism was an important influence on Gothic even when not directly represented within it, as its emphasis on the surface embodied in the charismatic, amoral male crystallises many of the genre's pre-existing characteristics. James I. Walpole's camp nostalgia, which led him to affect elaborate archaisms in his dress as well as collect kitsch antiquities, can be thought of as an antecedent of Aestheticism if not necessarily of dandyism proper. Dandyism and female cross-dressing, connected through their parallel negotiations with existing gender roles, constitute the specific fashion technologies through which the Gothic surface is articulated. Nevertheless, not only gender but also class and colonialism are implicated in the attendant narratives.

Le Fanu published two short stories in The Dublin University Magazine; set in County Limerick and seventeenth-century Milan respectively, 'Ultor de Lacy' and 'Borrhomeo the Astrologer' indicate a breadth of reference which also impresses. These two unacknowledged stories of 1861-2 should be read as part of an anxious Victorian reconsideration of major theological and political themes. With its glimpse of Elizabethan massacre 'Ultor de Lacy' remains an isolated item in Le Fanu's writing. The purported incident upon which it is based is of the kind chronicled in Thomas Stafford's Pacata Hibernica. Ultor De Lacy was neither the butcher of 1601 nor the victim of Ultor O'Donnell's supernatural revenge. He lived between these savage events, implicated in the 1745 Jacobite rising it is true, but a middling fellow, a central character in that apparently immunising sense.

This chapter traces the major people, dates, and places of Charles Robert Maturin's life. Critical suspicion of Maturin is evident in early studies of the Irish novel in which Maturin is very often dismissed as a mere imitator of Owenson, with questionable literary skill at best. More recently, work on Irish literature gestures towards an acknowledgement of Maturin's literary importance. This more often than not confirms his peripheral position in the annals of Irish literary history by reproducing him as a marginal figure. In this respect, Irish literary history has largely erased Maturin's existence from the central narrative of early nineteenth-century Irish literature, thereby effectively 'un-Maturin(ing)' Irish Romantic literature and its historiography. In so doing, twentieth- and twenty-first-century criticism has produced and supported a general cultural ignorance when it comes to Maturin and the details of his life.

Historicizing Gothic writing implies a narrative of descent, of change over time. Michel Foucault's theory of discourse will enable the readers to gain an historical purchase on Gothic writing. There are two related ways in which circularity arises to balk the theorist. First, he or she may find that their theory is predicated on the very 'gap' they seek to historicize. Marxist, feminist and psychoanalytical readings are particularly vulnerable here in that they read the repression on which their theories are based back into Gothic texts, thus closing the hermeneutic circle. Foucault instructs us to see the atavistic as circumscribed within the discursive practices of the new. In both Madness and Civilization and The History of Sexuality the specificity of the Gothic moment arises from the clash of incommensurate 'archives'.

A painting often regarded as Godfiried Schalcken's masterpiece Lady, Come into the Garden, derives from a parlour game with clear amorous and erotic implications. The painting attributed to Schalcken in Sheridan Le Fanu's story conforms to the conventional descriptions of the painter's style, his treatment of lighting, and placement of human figures. As with certain stylistic rearrangements of incident inside the story, the historical account suggest that Le Fanu has transferred items from debit to credit in a suggestive manner. By the 1830s, the great French Revolution was part of history, and the July Monarchy was in power in Paris. Le Fanu's fiction of the 1830s keeps a sharp eye on French politics, even through the medium of the gothic and the demonic.