Peter Otto considers of a series of creation scenes in Blake’s oeuvre that all feature a familiar image: a red disk. This image—variously, but also potentially simultaneously, a womb, head, pool, globe, and mirror—provides a pivot around which to organise the perspectival multiplicity that comprises Blake’s Bible of Hell. Using the trope of archeology as a way to think about how the past remains uncannily present in Blake’s moment and our own, Otto invites us to approach Blake spatially and graphically, in terms of constellations and arrangements, rather than sequentially and linearly. Blake’s images themselves ask us to consider phenomena along spatial axes, to traverse a field divided into quadrants, regions, and organs, and to take account of layers, superimpositions, and multiple ‘grounds’: foregrounds, middle-grounds, and backgrounds, as well as over- and undergrounds. Otto argues that for Blake the Gothic provided ‘a lexicon and iconography of elemental conflict and of powerful affect’.

This RobertsonLisa C.JanssenFlorebiographical chapter presents new information about Harkness’s eventful life. In spite of her active engagement with many of the leading writers, radicals, and social reformers in late nineteenth-century London, as well as her own political work and literary labour and extensive travels, relatively little is known about Margaret Elise Harkness. Four continents form part of her life narrative, which is only now beginning to reveal a more nuanced picture of her activities, associations, and accomplishments than was previously presumed. The consideration of newly uncovered materials on her is an exploration that extends beyond ‘darkest Londonʼ and suggests that there are additional relevant details that should be attached to her resume. Libraries and archives around the world possess key documents to enlighten her ideas pursuits, but there are also other unexpected settings and sources for a preliminary biographical investigation of the woman who was more than the author designated as John Law.

This chapter places the leisure pursuits of female characters in Harkness’s fiction in a broader context of gendered cultural anxieties about working-class leisure activities in the late nineteenth century. Focusing on two of Harkness’s novels, A City Girl and In Darkest London, it argues that, for working women in Harkness’s fiction, leisure may be difficult to access and often becomes another form of work. Comparing Harkness’s characters to women in other contemporary texts such as Liza of Lambeth, it shows how leisure pursuits often reflect and reproduce social dangers and structures of oppression for unmarried working-class women.

Lucy Cogan suggests that, for Blake, Gothic horror has more to do with putting together than it does taking apart the body. That is, if the experiences of terror and horror central to different forms of the Gothic often involve descriptions of physical torture, in Blake the representation of corporeal distress extends to the process of bodily formation, composition, and birth. Cogan thus reads the physical (de)formation of Urizen in light of William Hunter’s gruesome ‘anatomical obstetrics’, transforming the former into an allegory for Enlightenment scientific methodologies that are more than content to limit sensibility to a ratio of the senses, to murder and then dissect the imagination under the guise of birthing new light. ‘Like a distorted mirror-image of the Enlightenment scientists who used the tools of compass, telescope and microscope to chart the wonders of the universe’, Cogan argues that ‘Urizen by dividing and defining the material universe is also slicing into it, tearing and mutilating the fabric of existence’.

George Eastmont: Wanderer sealed Margaret Harkness’s disengagement from the socialist politics with which she had been actively involved since the 1880s. Its broad canvas also marked another key departure: the turn from late nineteenth-century slum fiction to the reinvigorated condition of England novel that characterised the Edwardian era. Unusually for Harkness, who wrote her books extremely quickly, George Eastmont: Wanderer underwent a long period of gestation. First mooted in the months following the 1889 Dockworkers’ Strike, the novel’s pivotal and deeply traumatic event, Harkness’s major work did not appear until some fifteen years later. This chapter attempts to decipher the painful history of this delay, situating it against the background of the author’s difficult reappraisal of her own political past and the critical interventions through which she distanced herself from the labour movement and the strike’s most significant achievement, the creation of the new unionism.

This chapter evaluates the writing Harkness produced during her time living in the countries that are now India, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka. Placing Harkness’s work in a nineteenth-century tradition of British historiographical writing about India that begins with James Mill’s History of British India (1817), the chapter argues that her work during this period consciously eschews conventional historical methodology and offers an important counter-narrative to colonial history. It suggests that in her attention to the ways that social movements and political institutions shape people’s daily lives, which is set within a broad foundation of personal knowledge, Harkness’s writing engages more ardently with the conventions of cultural history than it does with those of travel writing.

Kiel Shaub traces Rahab through Blake’s oeuvre, focusing especially on Night the Eighth of The Four Zoas, in order to ‘reveal how Blake’s depiction of Rahab is at least in part a critique of…conservative aspirations of the gothic revival’. Echoing Baulch’s reading of ‘Living Form,’ Shaub argues that Blake’s innovation—which is fundamentally a political innovation—has to do with his ‘understanding of “form” as a relational rather than an absolute distinction’. Indeed, it is Urizen, whose sense of order is ‘bondage’, who would impose absolute distinctions and in so doing transform the passionate Vala into the deadly Rahab: a figure—to recall Radcliffe’s terms mentioned above—of condensed horror born, reactively, from Urizen’s terror in the face of uncertainty. As Shaub argues, terror is the affective correlate of uncertainty and systemic, subjective, or ideological instability whereas horror is the affective form of paralysing determinateness. Rahab, he illustrates, physically embodies a process of ideological ratcheting-up that tends toward conservation in the name of safety, one that uses the threat of disorder as an alibi for total control.

This chapter maps and analyses new Gothic media and video games developed in the Nordic region. The chapter first considers what the concepts Gothic and Nordic actually entail when the focus is new media rather than literature or cinema. This is followed by analyses of four of the more important and widely disseminated games and considers the interactive stories that they tell in relation to the Nordic geographical, ideological and cultural landscape. The first two, Finnish Alan Wake (2010) and Swedish Little Nightmares (2017), are well funded and internationally distributed games made for an international audience. The other two, Swedish Year Walk (2013) and Norwegian Through the Woods (2016) are independent games that may look for wide dissemination, but that keep much closer to Nordic themes and settings.

This chapter investigates the two most influential examples of contemporary Nordic Gothic, Lars von Trier’s TV series Riget and John Ajvide Lindqvist’s novel Låt den rätte komma in and its Swedish film adaptation together with the American adaptations of these Nordic works: Stephen King’s Kingdom Hospital (ABC 2004) and Matt Reeves’ Let Me In (2010). The chapter first briefly discusses Gothic TV and TV horror and outlines how von Trier, King and Lindqvist have moved between different media. It then goes on to examine some differences between the Nordic and American productions that are related to Gothic humour. In terms of setting, the American adaptations are placed in small American towns rather than the central locations constituted by the Danish capital in Riget and the Stockholm suburb in Låt den rätte komma in. Whereas the American adaptations thus pertain to King’s brand of small-town American Gothic, the Nordic works can be seen as a kind of urban Gothic. The settings, the chapter suggests, also make visible ideological differences between the Nordic Gothic works and the American adaptations.

This chapter explores how the framework of a ‘long eighteenth century’ distorts our sense of Restoration literature through a process of selective reading and imagining that emphasises ‘the shape of the future’. The writings of Lord Rochester provide the ground on which this argument is tested. In tracing Rochester’s texts through the circuits of script and print, this chapter illuminates the radical unfixity of Rochester as cultural sign. To privilege Rochester’s ‘Augustanism’, or to see him, as recent commentators would have it, as a ‘proto-Whig’, is perforce to strain against the varied cultural scripts he so promiscuously fashioned and in which he was no less promiscuously apprehended and imagined. More largely, this chapter argues, by refiguring Rochester, we may also appreciate the decidedly mixed character of whatever might be called ‘Restoration modernity’.

Literary historians long considered Thomas Browne uninterested in the great events of his day. While more recent scholarship has revised this picture, it has tended to place the famous Dr Browne on the wrong side of a conflict between conservatives and radicals. This chapter begins by re-examining the relations between and among writing, politics, and class in revolutionary England, emphasising the fluidity of the ideological context in which Browne’s meditation was first written and published. The second part of the chapter traces the processual character of Browne’s text, that is, the multiplicity of material forms and circumstances in which his Religio Medici might have been encountered, and the various interlocutions that soon attached themselves to it and mediated its meanings. Finally, it seeks to reconstruct the religious subject and the spiritual politics constituted out of the text’s distinctive rhetorical form. Stepping out provisionally, with a sense of limitation, with a sense of style, this chapter argues, Religio Medici brilliantly addresses itself to the heresy of certainty under which Browne saw the Stuart church beginning to buckle.