This is the first full-length study to examine the links between high Romantic literature and what has often been thought of as a merely popular genre - the Gothic. Michael Gamer offers a sharply focused analysis of how and why Romantic writers drew on Gothic conventions whilst, at the same time, denying their influence in order to claim critical respectability. He shows how the reception of Gothic literature, including its institutional and commercial recognition as a form of literature, played a fundamental role in the development of Romanticism as an ideology. In doing so he examines the early history of the Romantic movement and its assumptions about literary value, and the politics of reading, writing and reception at the end of the eighteenth century. As a whole the book makes an original contribution to our understanding of genre, tracing the impact of reception, marketing and audience on its formation.

This book debates a crossover between the Gothic and the medical imagination in the Romantic period. It explores the gore and uncertainty typical of medical experimentation, and expands the possibilities of medical theories in a speculative space by a focus on Gothic novels, short stories, poetry, drama and chapbooks. By comparing the Gothic’s collection of unsavoury tropes to morbid anatomy’s collection of diseased organs, the author argues that the Gothic’s prioritisation of fear and gore gives it access to nonnormative bodies, reallocating medical and narrative agency to bodies considered otherwise powerless. Each chapter pairs a trope with a critical medical debate, granting silenced bodies power over their own narratives: the reanimated corpse confronts fears about vitalism; the skeleton exposes fears about pain; the unreliable corpse feeds on fears of dissection; the devil redirects fears about disability; the dangerous narrative manipulates fears of contagion and vaccination.

"Traces the Gothic impulses in proto-Romantic and Romantic British, American and European culture, 1740-1830"--Quatrième de couverture.

American Gothic Art and Architecture in the Age of Romantic Literature analyses the influence of British Gothic novels and historical romances on American art and architecture in the Romantic era.

An intriguing scholarly investigation, not so much of the ways the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries articulated pain, but of the ways in which pain itself articulated the late eighteenth-century experience. Through analysis of novels, plays, and poems, the author explores the transition from sensibility as a sense of "selflessness" to Romanticism, which puts the self in the foreground as the mediating consciousness. His tightly focused discussion sets a starting point for further critical investigation of the subject.

Gothic Romanticism, winner of the 2010 MLA Prize for Independent Scholars, is a study of the relationship between British Romanticism and the Gothic Revival. Reading a wide range of canonical and raretexts, and spanning the Romantic discourses of architecture, politics, and literary form, the book recovers the collaborative project of Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southeyfor a purified 'Gothic' poetry and a 'second Gothic' culture.

A psychological horror with a literary twist, Kill Creek delivers elevated prose, while evoking the unnerving, atmospheric terror essential to greats like Peter Straub and Stephen King—a haunting that lingers long after turning the last page.

From its very inception in the late eighteenth century, Romanticism's celebration of euphoria and sublimity has been dogged by its equally intense fascination with melancholia, insanity, crime, the grotesque and the irrational. In 1930, the famous literary theorist Mario Praz named this strain in literature "Dark Romanticism," but its equivalent in art has never been thoroughly assessed in art history. This volume is the first to examine a current that runs from Goya's war etchings through Symbolism and up to Surrealism, presenting Romanticism as an intellectual position that was embraced throughout Europe and that endured into the twentieth century. Among the artists included are Henry Fuseli, William Blake, Caspar David Friedrich, Victor Hugo, Arnold Böcklin, Gustave Moreau, Odilon Redon, Félicien Rops, James Ensor, Max Klinger, Edvard Munch, Hans Bellmer and Max Ernst.

The Romantic aesthetic of the 1810 1860 period embraced the imagination combining history, nature, religion, and terror into a fascinating melange expressed in the clothing of the era and influencing fashion design to the present day"