The typical feature of 'narratives of nurture' is that they are prone to discontinuity, rupture, incompletion. This chapter elaborates on an earlier contention, that the garden becomes a central Gothic topos owing to its peculiarly rich discursive resonance, its ability to raise the ideologically inflected issues of nature/nurture. As a literary structure, the garden typifies a recurring feature of Gothic writing. In discussing the Gothic aesthetic, the chapter argues that the discursive values of the Gothic afforded the basis of a strategy akin to the carnivalesque, where a resistance may be mounted. In assessing Gothic narratives of nurture, it is important to keep gender in mind. In male Gothic what one might call the 'deconstructive tendency of the carnivalesque' is kept in bounds by a psycho-sexual force, by a misogyny generally expressed as woman's monstrous otherness, her 'artificiality'.

The ironic fantasia in 'The Disinherited' ultimately climaxes in an excess of vision, a seeing of eyes on the pillow. 'The Disinherited' incorporates a subplot or retrospect, attached to a character called Prothero. To borrow terms more appropriate to Sheridan Le Fanu than the subtler Elizabeth Bowen, the gluttonous immediacy of Prothero's nocturnal writing releases an equally insatiable past. If on the haunted streets of Le Fanu's The Watcher, W. B. Yeats sought to build a great gazebo, an already ancient literary pedigree, it is fitting that he should both cite and suppress the papers of Martin Hesselius. Plagiarised at last, Le Fanu could find peace as well as his modicum of literary immortality. Literary history can develop methods and forms which are not excessively narrative, and do this without lapsing back into allusion hunting, image dissection, and passive contemplation.

Sheridan Le Fanu's The House by the Church-yard had included less concentrated inquiries of a kind similar to those conducted in the stories of 1861-2. Whether for financial reasons alone or otherwise, Le Fanu was obliged to abandon Irish historical settings in all his subsequent full-length novels. The novel Wylder's Hand, in allowing its narrator to associate freely round the name of Rachel Lake, displays its open frontier to Irish history and intrigue. Though there is a powerful contrast between this novel and its renowned successor, Uncle Silas, Le Fanu's first attempt at a novel of English contemporary life, deserves attention. The implosive order of Uncle Silas demonstrates a corollary, that symmetry sustains itself only in destruction. Yet in his efforts towards a singular universe Le Fanu unveils evidences of serial character and plural textuality which may prove to be innovative.

This chapter contains a collection of gothic texts between 1797 and 1845 connected with Gothic Renovations. William Godwin was one of the leading radical intellectuals of the Romantic era. Thomas Carlyle finds romance in the phantasmagoria of common experience; romance exists 'in Reality alone'. The logic of Carlyle's position is that one should no longer seek the supernatural in the manners of the Middle Ages, and therefore in Gothic romances; one finds it, rather, in the theatre of everyday life. Anna Laetitia Barbauld, nee Aikin, was a radical Dissenter and an important figure in the history of Gothic writing. The 'Gothic', in the shape of Sir Walter Scott's version of historical romance, supports the cause of conservative idealism. This thesis is antithetical to that of the essay by Godwin and demonstrates the way in which Gothic writing remains a site of contention.

Charles Robert Maturin's first novel, Fatal revenge, fundamentally pivots on the return of the dead. For Maturin's readers, Fatal revenge's insistent emphasis on the incestuousness of genders and genres may well have appeared particularly striking in the context of the contemporary Irish social and political scene. Maturin's The Milesian chief is identified as the transition point between the national tale and the historical novel as well as that between the national tale and the Gothic novel of the later nineteenth century. Fatal revenge acts as a primary literary juncture. In fact, it might be analysed usefully as a medium between Gothic novel and national tale, possessing elements of both. Fatal revenge vitally mixes the two, and, in so doing, stresses the fundamental importance of a Gothic sense of the past in the national tale.

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book investigates discursive structures intermittently recurring through Gothic writing. It explains that the intertextual readings form the methodological lynchpin for interpreting Gothic writing as self-aware debate on the character of the subject. The book argues that before one can theorize the Gothic as a response to a 'gap in the social subject' one needs to recoup the Gothic's contemporaneous meanings, itself a theoretical task. The book adopts Michel Foucault's 'genealogy' as the theoretically sensitive model of literary history. The book discusses the common usage of 'ideology' as referring to configurations of national or class values individuals might find themselves associated with, as for instance, 'liberalism' or the 'Freeborn Briton'.

Gladstonian liberalism quickly replaced an exhausted whiggery, and Gladstone's programme placed the Irish landlord system, education, and the established church at the head of its list of demons. The unnamed but recognisable upas tree, by which Gladstone introduced the notion of poisonous growth, unfamiliar now, had a long history as a romantic metaphor. In turn, Gladstone's upas tree becomes the totem pole of the Anglo-Irish. The metamorphosis of Gladstone's denunciation into a programme for self-enhanced dignity and cultural re-orientation follows a certain pattern in the naming of social groups. Gladstone re-baptised the Protestant Ascendancy by reading an order of anathema over its head. Ascendancy is another serial factor in the culture emergent in the last days of Sheridan Le Fanu.

This chapter traces the process by which the Charlotte Brontes came to be peculiarly associated with the ghostly, beginning in the nineteenth century, and views it as inextricably connected with their transformation from historical figures to fictional characters. It focuses, in particular, on the history of Charlotte's representation as revenant. The chapter considers how tropes of haunting are deployed across three distinct phases in Charlotte's fictionalisation: Elizabeth Gaskell's biography, nineteenth-century commemorative poetry, and the inter-war fictional biographies. Elizabeth Gaskell's Life of Charlotte Bronte was essential to the development of Bronte fictional biography. Gaskell wrote ghost stories, some of which were likely inspired by the Brontes and their fiction. Matthew Arnold composed the first Bronte ghost poem as an act of commemoration prior to the publication of Gaskell's Life. Writing commemorative poetry about dead authors, their final resting places and afterlives, was an established practice in nineteenth-century literary culture.

This chapter discusses the afterlives of Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre or Jane Eyre, and talks about the motivations and rewards in reimagining the Victorian. Jane Eyre links the Victorian literary canon with the sexual and financial politics of the sexually explicit 'erotic makeover' novels published in the immediate aftermath of Fifty Shades of Grey. The chapter concerns differing discourses of appropriation that substantiate the revisionist principles of both neo-Victorian novels and erotic makeovers. These discourses emerge from the texts themselves, from marketing material and reviews in both online and print media, and from within the academy. The chapter identifies shared financial imperatives and legitimating discourses that are proffered as an explanation for both genres' existence. It focuses on two case studies, the first a 'non-literary' erotic makeover from publisher Clandestine Classics and the second a neo-Victorian novel, Charlotte by D. M. Thomas.