The doppelganger or double is a frequently noted feature of Gothic fiction. The key critical text to theorise male doubles in Gothic literature is Eve Sedgwick's Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire. Daphne du Maurier's novel Rebecca sets the blueprint for the twentieth-century novel of the female double. Emma Tennant's novella The Bad Sister is a rewrite of Confessions of a Justified Sinner from the perspective of a female protagonist. In Rebecca, The Bad Sister and Single White Female, clothing provides a primary mechanism through which the exploration of the doppelganger theme is produced. Single White Female is saturated with fashion discourse. The film's title implicitly suggests the threat of the double to the construct of the 'single' woman, a historically specific category of femininity brought into being by magazines like Cosmopolitan.

Sheridan Le Fanu's relations with publishers were more primitive, though tensions between privacy and publicity can be observed in the mid-Victorian period. Being not only a contributor to the The Dublin University Magazine but also its proprietor and editor, Le Fanu was placed on a major cross-roads of private and public perspectives. The particular conditions of the private/public dichotomy in mid-Victorian Ireland can only be fully appreciated within the larger context of the United Kingdom of which Ireland was so anomalous a part. The dichotomy of public and private may be long-lived but it is at every stage historically conditioned. A theory of public opinion would thus concern itself more with significant fractures in the continuity rather than with yet another seamless chronicle.

This chapter contains collection of texts between 1777 and 1818 connected with Gothic origins. In terms of debate about Gothic origins, Thomas Warton's other main contribution was his controversial claim that romance was ultimately of Saracen origin. Julius Caesar's De Bello Gallico and Germania of Cornelius Tacitus are two important classical sources for the political debate on the Goths. The most striking feature of the Letters is Richard Hurd's insistence that Gothic art has its own distinct logic, derived from the social structure of feudalism, and its cultural expression, chivalry. The works of 'Ossian' appeared at the same time as the first Gothic fictions, and together they represented a new area of taste within literary culture. In the Dissertation, John Pinkerton takes issue with earlier writers on a variety of points, including the place of origin of the Goths, which he locates in Scythia, in the Middle East.

This conclusion presents some closing thoughts on the concepts discussed in the preceding chapters of this book. The book provides some historical contextualisation for the presentation of clothing in Gothic fiction. The nature of this exercise makes it difficult to draw any overriding conclusions about the function of clothing within the genre. Fashion discourses tend to defy any kind of totalising narrative, characteristically resisting closure in their endless preoccupation with recycling the past. The body in Gothic fictions is a profoundly unstable concept: continually evoked, nevertheless it is always disappearing beneath the mask or the veil. The process of bodily refashioning through Gothic fictions shows no sign of diminishing. The chapter illustrates the perennial power Gothic bodies possess to fashion themselves anew, replaying the preoccupation with surface and depth, using the example of the television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

The author argues that the readers should not understand the Gothic as a set of prose conventions, but as a discursive site crossing the genres. He argues that a suppression of this understanding of the Gothic seriously decontextualizes Christabel and its immediate ripostes, The Eve of St Agnes and Lamia. He counters the bias whereby the Gothic is read as a prose genre, a bias not shared by Coleridge, Walter Scott and Byron. They understood poetry to be the most fashionable medium for the Gothic tale of the supernatural. Christabel's status as a Gothic tale of the supernatural is universally accepted. The author argues that The Eve of St Agnes and Lamia establish a polemical conversation with Christabel and the Gothic. In this conversation the Gothic emerges as a language of subjective representation, for that nexus of tropes that includes the self, the body, boundaries, invasion, transgression, repression and desire.

Evidencing the literary hybridity of The Milesian Chief, Charles Robert Maturin's novel begins with a traditional national tale plot but graphically transforms and skews its conventions. The Milesian Chief has been described very rightly as 'a ruin text'; a text about the ruins and ruin of a nation. The Milesian Chief is a ruin itself, a physical reminder of the devastation of Irish history, forever haunted by the ghosts of the past, the (fictional) bodies sacrificed to history heaving within its pages. Confirming its status as a ruin text, Maturin's text echoes with the ghostly voices of the Gothic novel, the national tale, and the historical novel. It emerges as a hybrid text that accurately reflects the social, cultural, and political fragmentation of the author's contemporary Ireland. Irish reality, Maturin declares, is haunted by the past, preventing any kind of meaningful mediation between conflicting temporal or, indeed, geographical zones.

This chapter untangles some of the ways in which Goth style has permeated contemporary Gothic discourses, from the vampire fiction of Brite and Rice to the representation of Goth girls in teen movies. It foregrounds the dialectic between individual participants in the subculture and representations of Goth in a variety of media, from fashion journalism to fiction. The chapter explores the kind of critical investments made in contemporary depictions of Goth, in particular constructions of the subculture as middle-class, 'Taking it', and gendered feminine. It also examines the recycling of Goth style in mainstream fashion and haute couture, questioning why throughout the 1990s, the Gothic look always seemed to be coming back. Towards the end of the twentieth century, the critical discourses surrounding Gothic demonstrated a shift away from psychoanalytical modes towards historicism. In doing so, these discourses exhibited a heightened self-consciousness about the processes of critical and textual production.

This chapter contains a collection of gothic texts between 1709 and 1814 connected with the Anti-Gothic. John Dunlop's magisterial history deals briefly with English Gothic fiction. The extracts include his general comments on the genre, bracketing a survey of works by Horace Walpole, Clara Reeve and Ann Radcliffe. But Horace's Ars Poetica was by far the most frequent resort of opponents of Gothic fiction and drama. Sophia Lee's The Recess, which relates the adventures of two invented daughters of Mary, Queen of Scots, provoked some unease concerning the mingling of fiction and recorded history. William Beckford was the author of the orientalist Gothic tale Vathek, which was compared to the Arabian Nights on its first appearance. In spite of the praise lavished on Shakespeare's scenes of supernatural terror, and their popularity with audiences, there was strong critical opposition to the introduction of the marvellous into contemporary dramatic writing.

By focusing mainly on Sheridan Le Fanu, this chapter deals with a Victorian novelist of Irish birth and French background who utilised English, Welsh and Irish settings in his fiction. Le Fanu has been persistently aligned with a so-called Irish gothic tradition, inaugurated by Charles Robert Maturin and rendered notorious by Bram Stoker whose Dracula successfully transferred to the twentieth century and the snuff movie. The chapter also discusses the historical forces inscribed in Le Fanu's distinctive non-affiliation to the doubtful gothic tradition. In Le Fanu's recurrent character, Richard Marston, there is perhaps a nervous impersonation of Vautrin. Le Fanu's relation to his distinguished French contemporary raises far more engaging problems than those of a merely convenient tradition of Irish Gothicism.

This chapter contains a collection of gothic texts between 1776 and 1801 connected with Gothic and Revolution. As the minutes make clear, radical opinion interpreted the events of 1789 in terms of the Glorious Revolution of 1688. For many historically minded commentators, a key aspect of Gothic writing was the mirroring of the Glorious and French Revolutions where the balance of similarities and differences found itself repeatedly disturbed by stubborn anxieties. Gothic imagery is used to evoke the immanence of the past within the present, for instance in the description of the French constitution as a ruined castle, or of the state 'grasped as in a kind of mortmain for ever'. Ann Radcliffe's husband was editor and proprietor of the Whig newspaper, the English Chronicle. The newspaper enthusiastically welcomed the French Revolution, while Radcliffe's own family had links with the same Dissenting culture that included Priestley and Price.

The literary formulation of Parnell's last year is a construct in which romantic notions of the demonic figure if not prominently then at least powerfully. Parnell died in 1891 and the great concentration of W. B. Yeats's writing about Parnell dates from the 1930s. The young Yeats discounted eighteenth-century writing, and his rediscovery of its value for him broadly coincides with the final emergence of Parnell the persona from a silent chrysalis. In The Literary Fantastic, Neil Cornwell has adapted the approach of Tzvetan Todorov to redefine what gothic literature was and how it worked. Preferring terms like 'the pure fantastic' to ambiguous ones such as 'the gothic', Cornwell locates the fantastic on 'a frontier between two adjacent realms'. Yeats's gothic, as evidenced in his demonic transformation of Parnell, is implicated in his sense of international politics from the First World War onwards.