The Encyclopedia of the Gothic

By William Hughes, David Punter and Andrew Smith

The Encylopedia of the Gothic features a series of newly-commissioned essays from experts in Gothic studies that cover all aspects of the Gothic as it is currently taught and researched, along with the development of the genre and its impact on contemporary culture.

• Comprises over 200 newly commissioned entries written by a stellar cast of over 130 experts in the field
• Arranged in A-Z format across two fully cross-referenced volumes
• Represents the definitive reference guide to all aspects of the Gothic
• Provides comprehensive coverage of relevant authors, national traditions, critical developments, and notable texts that define, shape, and inform the genre
• Extends beyond a purely literary analysis to explore Gothic elements of film, music, drama, art, and architecture.
• Explores the development of the genre and its impact on contemporary culture

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wiley
• Release date: Oct 8, 2015
• ISBN: 9781119210467

Book preview

Alphabetical List of Entries

Abjection

Abyss, The

Adultery

African American Gothic

Aickman, Robert

Ainsworth, William Harrison

American Gothic

Amityville Horror, The

Angel (1999—2004)

Anglo-Caribbean Gothic

Anti-Semitism

Apparition

Architecture, Gothic

Architecture, Gothic Revival

Asian Gothic

Asylums

Atwood, Margaret

Australian Gothic

Barker, Clive

Baudelaire, Charles

Beckford, William

Benson, E. F. (Edward Frederic)

Bierce, Ambrose

Blackwood, Algernon

Blood

Bluebooks

Braddon, Mary Elizabeth

Brite, Poppy Z.

Brown, Charles Brockden

Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997—2003)

Bulwer Lytton, Edward

Bürger, Gottfried

Burton, Tim

Byron, George Gordon, Sixth Baron

Cabell, James Branch

Campbell, Ramsey

Campus Gothic

Canadian Gothic

Carter, Angela

Collins, Wilkie

Comic Gothic

Comics and Graphic Novels

Commodity Gothicism

Contemporary Gothic

Corelli, Marie

Counterfeit

Crime

Criticism

Cronenberg, David

Crowley, Aleister

Cryptonymy

Cult Fiction

Cults

Curse

Cyberspace

De Quincey, Thomas

Degeneration

Dickens, Charles

Disability

Domestic Gothic

Dostoevsky, Fyodor

Doubles

Drama

Dreams

Drugs and Alcohol

Du Maurier, Daphne

Dutch Gothic

Environment

European Gothic

Family

Fate

Faulkner, William

Female Gothic

Film

Film, French

Fin-de-Siècle Gothic

Folklore

French Gothic

Friday the 13th (1980)

Future Gothic

Games

German Expressionism

German Gothic

Ghost Stories

Godwin, William

Goth

Gothic 1900 to 1950

Gothic 1950 to the Present

Graveyard Poetry

Grotesque, The

Halloween (1978)

Hammer House

Hawthorne, Nathaniel

Herbert, James

Hill, Susan

Hodgson, William Hope

Hoffmann, E. T. A. (Ernst Theodor Amadeus)

Hogg, James

Horror Fiction

Hypnotism

Imperial Gothic

Incest

Inheritance

Inquisition, The

International Gothic Association, The

Intertext

Ireland, William Henry

Irish Gothic

Jackson, Shirley

James, Henry

James, M. R. (Montague Rhodes)

Japanese Gothic

Jewish Gothic

Kafka, Franz

King, Stephen

Kipling, Rudyard

Lathom, Francis

Law and the Gothic

Le Fanu, Joseph Sheridan

Lemoine, Ann

Lesbian Gothic

Lewis, Matthew

Liminality

Lovecraft, H. P. (Howard Phillips)

Lugosi, Bela

Macabre, The

MacDonald, George

Machen, Arthur

Magazines

Manga

Marsh, Richard

Masks, Veils, and Disguises

Matheson, Richard

Maturin, Charles Robert

McCabe, Patrick

McCarthy, Cormac

McGrath, Patrick

Medicine and the Gothic

Mediumship

Melodrama

Melville, Herman

Misogyny

Modernism

Monster Movies

Monstrosity

Mummies

Music

Necromancy

New England Gothic

New Zealand Gothic

Nightmare on Elm Street, A (1984)

Nodier, Charles

Oates, Joyce Carol

Occultism

Odoevsky, Vladimir

Opera

Penny Dreadfuls

Phobia

Poe, Edgar Allan

Poison

Polidori, John

Popular Culture

Portraits

Postcolonial Gothic

Postfeminist Gothic

Poststructuralism and the Gothic

Protestantism

Psychical Investigation

Psychoanalysis

Psychological Thrillers

Queer Gothic

Race

Radcliffe, Ann

Radio

Reeve, Clara

Reynolds, G. W. M. (George William MacArthur)

Rice, Anne

Riddell, Charlotte

Rohmer, Sax

Roman Catholicism

Romanticism

Rosicrucianism

Ruins

Russian Gothic

Sade, Donatien Alphonse François, Marquis de

Scandinavian Gothic

Schiller, Friedrich von

Science and the Gothic

Scottish Gothic

Secret Histories

Secret Societies

Sensation Fiction

Sensibility

Sex

Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft

Shelley, Percy Bysshe

Sinclair, May

Slasher Movies

Slavery and the Gothic

Southern Gothic

Spectacle

Spectrality

Spiritualism

Stevenson, Robert Louis

Stoker, Bram

Sturm und Drang

Sublime, The

Suburban Gothic

Supernatural, The

Taboo

Tales of Terror

Teaching the Gothic

Technologies

Tegg, Thomas

Television

Terror

Theory

Thompson, Alice

Twilight

Uncanny, The

Urban Gothic

Vampire Fiction

Victorian Gothic

Village Gothic

Voodoo

Walpole, Horace

Wells, H. G. (Herbert George)

Welsh Gothic

Werewolves

Wharton, Edith

Wheatley, Dennis

Wilde, Oscar

Wilkinson, Sarah

Williams, Tennessee

Witchcraft

Wordsworth, William

Zombies

General Editors

William Hughes is Professor of Gothic Studies at Bath Spa University and a past Joint President of the International Gothic Association. His publications include Beyond Dracula (2000), That Devil's Trick: Hypnotism and the Victorian Popular Imagination (2015), and Ecogothic (2013), the latter co-edited with Andrew Smith. Hughes is also the founding editor of Gothic Studies, the refereed journal of the International Gothic Association.

David Punter is Professor of English at the University of Bristol. His range and depth of critical work has been compared with that of Mario Praz and Edward Said. He has published some twenty books on Gothic, Romantic, modern and contemporary literature, and on psychoanalytic and other literary theory; he has also published four small volumes of poetry. He is generally recognized as the founder of modern criticism of the Gothic, and as an inspiration behind contemporary Goth culture.

Andrew Smith is Reader in Nineteenth Century English Literature at the University of Sheffield. He is a past Joint President of the International Gothic Association. Publications include The Ghost Story 1840-1920: A Cultural History (2010), Gothic Literature (2007, revised 2013), Victorian Demons (2004), and Gothic Radicalism (2000). He is a series editor of Gothic Literary Studies and Gothic Authors: Critical Revisions (with Ben Fisher) and of The Edinburgh Companions to the Gothic (with William Hughes).

Notes on Contributors

Jane Aaron is a Professor in the School of Humanities at the University of Glamorgan, where she teaches courses on Welsh writing in English. She is the author of A Double Singleness: Gender and the Writings of Charles and Mary Lamb (1991); Nineteenth-Century Women's Writing in Wales: Nation, Gender and Identity (2007), which won the Roland Mathias Prize in 2009; and coeditor of Our Sisters' Land: The Changing Identities of Women in Wales (1994), Postcolonial Wales (2005), and Gendering Border Studies (2010). She is also the series editor of Honno Press' reprints of Welsh women writers and coeditor of two of the University of Wales Press' book series, Gender Studies in Wales and Writers of Wales.

Emily Alder is a part-time Lecturer in Literature at Edinburgh Napier University and Associate Lecturer at the Open University in Scotland. She researches intersections of literature and science, particularly in the late-Victorian and Edwardian period, but also in contemporary science fiction; she has published articles on H. G. Wells, William Hope Hodgson, and Stephen Donaldson, and is coeditor of Gothic Science Fiction, 1980—2010 (2011).

Katarzyna Ancuta is a Lecturer at Assumption University in Bangkok, Thailand. Her publications are concerned with interdisciplinary contexts of contemporary Gothic and Horror, (South)-East Asian cinema, and supernatural anthropology. She is currently working on a book on Asian Gothic, a multimedia project on Bangkok Gothic, and a number of local film projects.

Agnes Andeweg is a Lecturer at the Centre for Gender and Diversity of Maastricht University. In her PhD thesis she analyzed Gothic in contemporary Dutch novels (Griezelig gewoon. Gotieke verschijningen in Nederlandse romans, 1980—1995, forthcoming). She published on the same topic in Van Elferen, Nostalgia or Perversion (2007). Currently she is working on a project about Gothic kinship.

Lucie Armitt is Professor of Literary and Cultural Studies at the University of Salford, where she teaches nineteenth-, twentieth-, and twenty-first-century fiction, including a Master's level module on the Gothic. Her principal publications include Where No Man Has Gone Before: Women and Science Fiction (1991), Theorising the fantastic (1996), Contemporary Women's Fiction and the Fantastic (2000), George Eliot: Readers' Essential Guide to Criticism (2000), Fantasy Fiction (2005), and Twentieth-Century Gothic (2011).

John S. Bak is Professeur at Nancy-Université in France, where he teaches courses in literary journalism, American drama, and American Gothic. His books on the Gothic and on Tennessee Williams include Post/modern Dracula: From Victorian Themes to Postmodern Praxis (editor, 2006), New Selected Essays: Where I Live (editor, 2009), and Ernest Hemingway, Tennessee Williams, and Queer Masculinities (2009).

Colette Balmain is an independent scholar as well as a Lecturer in Film and Media Studies. Her area of research is horror cinema and Gothic studies, with a particular research interest in East Asian cinema and cultures. Her first book, Introduction to Japanese Horror Film, was published in 2008. She is currently working on her second book, on Korean horror cinema, and is also the editor for Directory of World Cinema: South Korea.

Mackenzie Bartlett is a Lecturer in English Literature at Mount Saint Vincent University, Canada. She completed her PhD at Birkbeck College (University of London) in 2009 and has published and presented papers on Gothic fiction and the pathologization of laughter in late Victorian Britain. Her current research is in humor theory and the expression of laughter in twentieth-century horror films.

Mark Bennett is a PhD student at the University of Sheffield, researching the relationship between travel writing and the emergence of the Gothic at the end of the eighteenth century. He is an ongoing contributor to the Routledge A. B. E. S. database and a reviewer for the journal Gothic Studies, and has produced material for The Victorian Literature Handbook (ed. Alexandra Warwick and Martin Willis, 2008).

Christine Berthin, Professor of English, Université de Paris Ouest Nanterre, has published widely on Gothic topics and on Romanticism. She is the author of Gothic Hauntings: Melancholy Crypts and Textual Ghosts (2010).

Ruth Bienstock Anolik teaches at Villanova University and Temple University. Most of her work focuses on the Gothic with a special interest in the interplay between Gothic literature and social and cultural structures. She has published essays in Modern Language Studies, Legal Studies Forum, Partial Answers, and Studies in American Jewish Literature. Her essay on Toni Morrison's A Mercy appears in the collection 21st Century Gothic (2010) She has edited three collections of essays on the Gothic: The Gothic Other: Racial and Social Constructions in the Literary Imagination (2004), Horrifying Sex: Essays on Sexual Difference in the Gothic Imagination (2007), and Demons of the Body and Mind: Essays on Disability in Gothic Literature (2010).

Francesca Billiani is Senior Lecturer in Italian Studies at the University of Manchester. She is the author of Culture nazionali e narrazioni straniere, Italia 1903—1943 (2007), editor of Modes of Censorship and Translation: National Contexts and Diverse Media (2007) and coeditor of The Italian Gothic and Fantastic: Encounters and Rewritings of Literary Traditions (2007). She has published articles on Italian literature and culture, Fascist censorship, cosmopolitanism, and several contributions on nineteenth-century Italian Gothic literature. She is currently working on a monograph on Modernism and Italian Fascism as well as on a coauthored book on post-1945 Italian intellectual engagement.

Peter Billingham is Head of the Performing Arts Department and Reader in Political Drama at the University of Winchester. He is a very experienced teacher, researcher, and writer. His monograph At the Sharp End (2008) was nominated for the Theatre Book Prize and the Writers' Guild Theatre Book Award. He is currently researching Edward Bond: A Critical Study (forthcoming in 2013). He is also an award-winning playwright and his latest play, The Pornographer of Vienna, is about the controversial artist Egon Schiele.

Linnie Blake is Principal Lecturer in Film in Manchester Metropolitan University's Department of English. She has contributed a range of papers to national and international conferences in the area of film and Gothic studies and has published widely on topics ranging from Torchwood's queer Gothic to Edgar Allan Poe and from the Situationist International to gameshow horror in recent Thai cinema. Her most recent book is The Wounds of Nations (2008), a study of the politics of national trauma as evinced in the postwar horror cinemas of America, Britain, Germany, and Japan.

Fred Botting is Professor in the School of Humanities, Kingston University, London. His two most recent books are Limits of Horror (2008) and Gothic Romanced (2008). He is coeditor (with Scott Wilson) of Bataille: A Critical Reader (1998). His research interests include cultural and critical theory (psycho- and schiz-analysis); Bataille and general economy; romanticism and postmodernism; techno-poiesis; uncanny media (Gothic technologies, cybergothic, neuromanticism); smoking; sublimity; consumption and horror; and zombies.

Benjamin A. Brabon is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at Edge Hill University. His book-length publications include (with Stéphanie Genz) Postfeminist Gothic: Critical Interventions in Contemporary Culture (2007) and Postfeminism: Cultural Texts and Theories (2009), as well as the single-authored monograph Gothic Cartography: A Literary Geography of Haunting (2011). He is currently editing a collection of essays on The Postfeminist Eighteenth Century.

Elisabeth Bronfen is Professor for English and American studies at the University of Zurich. She is the author of Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity and the Aesthetic (1992), The Knotted Subject: Hysteria and its Discontents (1998), and a cultural history of the night, forthcoming from Columbia University Press.

Glennis Byron is Professor of English at the University of Stirling. She has published various books and articles on Victorian and contemporary Gothic. Global Gothic, a collection of essays emerging from the AHRC Global Gothic network, is forthcoming from Manchester University Press.

James Campbell is a doctoral student at the University of Stirling, where in 2009 he completed a BA in English Studies before taking the department's MLitt in The Gothic Imagination. His thesis, begun in 2010, reframes American Gothic in the context of globalization. To date, he has presented papers on DC Comics' Batman franchise and Washington Irving's The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, and recently contributed an article scheduled for inclusion in Glennis Byron's forthcoming critical anthology Globalgothic.

Stephen Carver gained his PhD in English Literature from the University of East Anglia in 2000. He currently teaches creative writing online for UEA while also working as a freelance writer and editor. He is the biographer of W. H. Ainsworth, and is presently working on book projects about Tim Burton, Spiritualism, horror comics, and motorcycle movies.

Sue Chaplin is Senior Lecturer in English at Leeds Metropolitan University and works on the literature of Romanticism and Gothic literature. She has recently published Gothic Literature: Texts, Contexts, Connections (2011) and has coedited with Professor Joel Faflak the Romanticism Handbook (2011). Her monograph Gothic and the Rule of the Law (2007) interrogates the relation between juridical discourses and emerging forms of Gothicism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Her previous monograph, Law, Sensibility and the Sublime in Eighteenth-Century Women's Fiction (2004), is an interdisciplinary study of women's writing and women writers from 1740 to the early nineteenth century.

Anna Chromik is a Lecturer in Cultural and Literary Theory at the Institute of English Cultures and Literatures, University of Silesia, Poland. Her research and previous publications focus on the discourses of corporeality in the contemporary critique of modern subjectivity, as well as the notion of liquid subjectivities in Gothic fiction.

Gavin Cologne-Brookes is Professor of American Literature at Bath Spa University and teaches modules on the nineteenth- and twentieth-century European novel in translation. He is the author of The Novels of William Styron: From Harmony to History (1995) and Dark Eyes on America: The Novels of Joyce Carol Oates (2005), and has written essays on Styron and Tolstoy, and Oates and Dostoevsky.

L. Andrew Cooper is Assistant Professor of Film and Digital Media at the University of Louisville. His first book, Gothic Realities: The Impact of Horror Fiction on Modern Culture (2010), discusses the reality-shaping effects of Gothic horror over three centuries. His next book, Dario Argento (2012), focuses on the titular Italian director of cult horror films.

Neil Cornwell, in addition to his work writing on and translating Odoevsky, has translated works by Daniil Kharms and Vladimir Mayakovsky. His other authored books include The Literary Fantastic (1990), James Joyce and the Russians (1992), Vladimir Nabokov (1999), and The Absurd in Literature (2006). He has also edited the Reference Guide to Russian Literature (1998) and The Routledge Companion to Russian Literature (2001), as well as having been (until 2011) the Russian editor for The Literary Encyclopedia. He is now Professor Emeritus (Russian and Comparative Literature) at the University of Bristol (having lectured previously at Queen's University, Belfast, from 1973 to 1987).

Charles L. Crow is Professor Emeritus of English at Bowling Green State University, where he taught for over 30 years. He is the author of American Gothic (2009), and essays on such writers as Mark Twain, W. D. Howells, Frank Norris, Jack London, Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, Janet Lewis, and Maxine Hong Kingston. He edited A Companion to the Regional Literatures of America (2003) and American Gothic 1787—1916: An Anthology (1999), and coedited (with Howard Kerr) The Occult in America (1983) and (with Howard Kerr and John W. Crowley) The Haunted Dusk: American Supernatural Fiction, 1820—1920 (1983).

James Stevens Curl, Professor Emeritus, has held chairs in Architectural History at two universities. He is currently Visiting Professor at the Faculty of Art, Design, and the Built Environment, University of Ulster, and Honorary Senior Research Fellow, The Queen's University of Belfast. He read for his Doctorate at University College London, and in 1991—2 and 2002 was Visiting Fellow at Peterhouse, University of Cambridge. In 2010 he was inducted a Member of the Royal Irish Academy, and he is also a Fellow of the Royal Incorporation of Architects in Scotland, a Member of the Royal Institute of the Architects of Ireland, and a Member of the Royal Institute of British Architects. His many publications include the Oxford Dictionary of Architecture and Landscape Architecture (2000), Victorian Architecture: Diversity & Invention (2007), The Victorian Celebration of Death (2004), Death and Architecture (2002), and, most recently, Freemasonry & the Enlightenment: Architecture, Symbols, & Influences (2011).

Nicholas Daly is Chair in Modern English and American Literature at University College Dublin. He is the author of three monographs on nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature and culture, most recently Sensation and Modernity in the 1860s (2009). He is currently working on a study of the circulation of narratives and images of the urban among Paris, London, and New York.

Carol Margaret Davison is Professor of English Literature at the University of Windsor, Canada. Her published books include Anti-Semitism and British Gothic Literature (2004) and History of the Gothic: Gothic Literature 1764—1824 (2009). She is currently at work on a casebook of criticism relating to the British Gothic from 1764 to 1824 and a study of the Scottish Gothic.

Justin D. Edwards is Professor of English at the University of Surrey. He is the author of several books, including Gothic Passages: Racial Ambiguity and the American Gothic (2003), Gothic Canada: Reading the Spectre of a National Literature (2005), Postcolonial Literature (2008), and Mobility at Large (2012).

Gary Farnell is a Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Winchester. A member of the International Gothic Association, he has published a number of articles and book chapters on the Gothic. He has also published on Walter Benjamin's Gothic Marxism in New Formations and in Historical Materialism.

Max Fincher is the author of Queering Gothic in the Romantic Age: the Penetrating Eye (2007). He has also edited Francis Lathom's The Fatal Vow (2011), and is the author of Ambrosio, a screen adaptation of Matthew Lewis' The Monk. He is currently completing his first novel, The Pretty Gentleman, a queer historical thriller. See www.maxfincher.com.

Benjamin F. Fisher, Emeritus Professor of English, University of Mississippi, has published widely on Gothic topics, is author or editor of eight books on Poe, a contributor of chapters to many books in American or Victorian studies, serves on editorial boards for six professional journals, and is a member of the Executive Board for the International Gothic Association.

Matt Foley is a final-year doctoral student at the University of Stirling where he is completing a thesis on Haunting Modernisms. He has published articles on D. H. Lawrence's ghost stories and the poetry of T. S. Eliot. He has also published, along with Aspasia Stephanou and Neil McRobert, an edited collection Transgression and its Limits (2012). His general interests include modernist literature, the Gothic, and psychoanalysis.

Caroline Franklin is a Professor of English at Swansea University. She has written three books and many articles on Byron, and recently edited The Longman Anthology of Gothic Verse (2011), where many of the poems mentioned in this entry may be found.

Nick Freeman is Senior Lecturer in English at Loughborough University. He has published widely on the literature and culture of the fin de siècle and is the author of two books, Conceiving the City: London, Literature and Art 1870—1914 (2007) and 1895: Drama, Disaster and Disgrace in Late Victorian Britain (2011).

Katie Garner is a PhD student and Postgraduate Tutor in English Literature at Cardiff University. Her doctoral thesis explores women writers' creative and scholarly responses to the medieval revival in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Her publications include an essay-length entry on Feminism in The Encyclopedia of Literary and Cultural Theory: Literary Theory from 1966 to the Present (2010) and a forthcoming article on Angela Carter and the visual arts.

Greg Garrard is Reader in Literature and the Environment at Bath Spa University. He is the author of Ecocriticism (2011) and the editor of The Oxford Handbook of Ecocriticism (forthcoming).

Ken Gelder is a Professor of English at the University of Melbourne. His books include Reading the Vampire (1994), Uncanny Australia: Sacredness and Identity in a Postcolonial Nation (1998), Popular Fiction: The Logics and Practices of a Literary Field (2004), and Subcultures: Cultural Histories and Social Practice (2007).

Stéphanie Genz is Senior Lecturer in Media at Edge Hill University. Her publications include (with Benjamin A. Brabon) Postfeminist Gothic: Critical Interventions in Contemporary Culture (2007) and Postfeminism: Cultural Texts and Theories (2009), as well as the single-authored monograph Postfemininities in Popular Culture (2010).

Monica Germanà is Senior Lecturer in English Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Westminster. Her research interests include the Gothic, women's writing, and Scottish literature. Her publications include Scottish Women's Gothic and Fantastic Writing (2010) and a special issue of Gothic Studies dedicated to contemporary Scottish Gothic (November 2011).

Matthew Gibson is the author of Yeats, Coleridge and the Romantic Sage (2000) and Dracula and the Eastern Question: British and French Vampire Narratives of the Nineteenth Century Near East (2006). He is currently working on a new book about the counter-revolutionary Gothic.

Ruth Gilbert is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Winchester. She is currently completing Writing Jewish: Contemporary British-Jewish Literature.

Terry Hale's main research interest relates to literary translation. In recent years, he has published widely on such issues as the extent to which French plays were altered and adapted for the British stage; the role translation has played in the development of genres such as the detective story, the Gothic novel, science fiction, and the Western; and on the relationship of translation to the British and North American publishing industries. As a practicing translator, he is also interested in all aspects of preparing translations for publication or performance. His other research interests include nineteenth-century fantasy writing, the fin-de-siècle novel (particularly the work of J.-K. Huysmans), Dada and Surrealism, French film, and international crime writing.

Faye Hammill is Professor of English at the University of Strathclyde. She is the author of Sophistication: A Literary and Cultural History (2010), Women, Celebrity and Literary Culture Between the Wars (2007), Canadian Literature (2007), and Literary Culture and Female Authorship in Canada (2003, winner of the International Council for Canadian Studies Pierre Savard award).

Richard J. Hand is Professor of Theatre and Media Drama at the University of Glamorgan, Wales. He has research interests in adaptation and popular horror cultures. He is the author of Terror on the Air: Horror Radio in America, 1931—52 (2006) and the coauthor of two books on Grand-Guignol horror theater (2002 and 2007).

Elaine Hartnell-Mottram lectures in English Literature at Liverpool Hope University. Her current research interests include the Gothic (especially her own theory, the Gothic of the Normal); domestic fiction (all periods); nineteenth-century popular fiction, especially that by women; Poe; and Hawthorne. She has published in these areas. She is also interested in new approaches to Jane Austen and in the poetry of George Herbert.

Ruth Heholt is a Senior Lecturer in English at University College Falmouth. Her PhD was on masculinity and her research interests involve the supernatural, ghost stories, folklore, and the Gothic. Her work ranges from Victorian literature on ghosts to popular ghost hunting programs on television today.

Diane Long Hoeveler is Professor of English at Marquette University, Milwaukee, Wisconsin. She is the author of Romantic Androgyny (1990), Gothic Feminism (1998), and Gothic Riffs: Secularizing the Uncanny in the European Imaginary, 1780—1820 (2010).

Jerrold E. Hogle is Professor of English, University Distinguished Professor, and Director of Undergraduate Studies and Honors in English at the University of Arizona. He is also a Past-President of the International Gothic Association and the Chair of the General Editors for the International Gothic book series at Manchester University Press. The winner of multiple teaching awards and Guggenheim, Mellon, and other fellowships for research, he has published widely on English Romantic literature, literary theory, and, more recently, the Gothic in many forms. His books in that area include The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction (2002) and The Undergrounds of The Phantom of the Opera (2002), and he is now putting together, among other projects, The Cambridge Companion to the Modern Gothic.

Michael Hollington is a retired former Professor at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia and the University of Toulouse in France. He is still active in writing and research, especially on Dickens, and is currently editing The Reception of Charles Dickens in Europe for Continuum Press.

Avril Horner is Emeritus Professor of English at Kingston University, London. Her research interests focus on Gothic fiction and women's writing. She has coauthored many articles and books with Sue Zlosnik, including Daphne du Maurier: Writing, Identity and the Gothic Imagination (1998) and Gothic and the Comic Turn (2005). She is editor of European Gothic: A Spirited Exchange, 1760—1960 (2002) and coeditor with Sue Zlosnik of Le Gothic: Influences and Appropriations in Europe and America (2008), with whom she also published a scholarly edition of Eaton Stannard Barrett's The Heroine (2011). She is coeditor (with Anne Rowe) of Iris Murdoch and Morality (2010) and Iris Murdoch: Texts and Contexts (2012). She is currently working with Anne Rowe on Living on Paper: The Letters of Iris Murdoch 1945—1995, to be published in 2014. With Janet Beer she has published three essays on Edith Wharton's fiction and a book on Wharton's late novels entitled Edith Wharton: Sex, Satire and the Older Woman (2011). She was Joint-President of the International Gothic Association 2005—9.

Chiung-Ying Huang is a final-year PhD candidate in the English Department, University of Bristol. Her PhD thesis is titled Illuminating Passions: Portraits of (Wo)Men's Passions in Victorian Painting and Poetry. Her research interests mainly center on the interconnections between visual arts and literature in the nineteenth century. She has delivered conference papers on a variety of nineteenth-century related topics, and has also published articles on John Keats, J. W. Waterhouse, and Algernon Charles Swinburne.

Charles Inouye is a Professor of Japanese at Tufts University. He is the author of Japanese Gothic Tales (1996) and In Light of Shadows: More Gothic Tales by Izumi Kyōka (2005), for which he won the Japan—US Friendship Commission Prize for the best English translation of a work of Japanese literature. Other publications include Unburying Figurality: Japan's Contributions to the Globalgothic, in Glennis Byron (ed.), Globalgothic (2012).

Timothy Jones received his PhD from Victoria University of Wellington and teaches at Victoria and Massey Universities. He has published in Gothic Studies and reviewed for The Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies and New Zealand Books. His research interests include genre as a practice and experience, and the New Zealand Gothic.

Jeffrey Kahan completed his PhD at the Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham in 1993. He is the author of Reforging Shakespeare (1998), The Cult of Kean (2006), and Bettymania and the Birth of Celebrity Culture (2010), and is coauthor of Caped Crusaders 101 (2006), now in its second edition (2010). His scholarly editions include Shakespeare Imitations, Parodies and Forgeries, 1710—1820 (2004), The Poetry of William-Henry Ireland (2004), Robert Southey's Epic Poetry (2006), Much Ado About Nothing (2006), Pericles (2009), and Coriolanus (2012). He has also edited a variety of nineteenth-century Gothic novels, including Gondez the Monk (2005), Rimauldo (2006), and The Abbess (2007). Kahan edited King Lear: New Critical Essays (2008) and has guest-edited many journals, including Cithara and The Ben Jonson Journal; he is a board member of Shakespeare Yearbook, Studies in Gothic Fiction, The Dark Man, and the fledgling Udolpho Press.

Jarlath Killeen is a Lecturer in Victorian Literature in Trinity College Dublin. He is the author of four monographs: The Faiths of Oscar Wilde (2005), Gothic Ireland (2005), The Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde (2007), and Gothic Literature, 1825—1914 (2009). He has most recently edited Oscar Wilde: Irish Writers in Their Time (2010).

Tanya Krzywinska has been Professor in Screen Studies at Brunel University since 1996. She is the author of several books and many articles on different aspects of videogames and on representations of the occult and of sex/sexuality. Currently she is working on a book on the Gothic in games and on a Gothic iPad app. She convenes a Masters and PhD program entitled Digital Games: Theory and Design at Brunel University.

Yvonne Leffler is Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden. She has published several books and articles about the rise of the novel in Scandinavian literature, Gothic literature, and horror fiction, for instance I skräckens lustgård. Skräckromantik i svenska 1800-talsromaner (1991) and Horror as Pleasure. The Aesthetics of Horror Fiction (2000).

Conny Lippert is working on her PhD thesis concerning Gothic topographies at the University of Bristol. She completed her BA at the University of Bayreuth, Germany, and her MA at the University of Nottingham. Her wider field of interests focuses on the Gothic and horror genres in different media.

Rebecca Lloyd is a Senior Lecturer in English at University College Falmouth. Her research interests and work explore the Victorian theater and music hall and comedy, as well as the supernatural and the Gothic.

Tricia Lootens is Josiah Meigs Distinguished Teaching Professor and Associate Professor of English at the University of Georgia. Her publications include Lost Saints: Silence, Gender, and Victorian Literary Canonization (1996) and essays on teaching Gothic literature.

Roger Luckhurst is Professor of Modern Literature at Birkbeck College and author of The Invention of Telepathy (2002) and The Mummy's Curse (2012).

Anthony Mandal is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at Cardiff University. His research interests focus on nineteenth-century literature and print culture, the history of the book, and the Gothic. He is the author of Jane Austen and the Popular Novel: The Determined Author (2007) and coeditor of The English Novel, 1830—1836 (2003) and The Reception of Jane Austen in Europe (2007). He is one of the general editors of the New Edinburgh edition of the collected works of Robert Louis Stevenson (2009—), and coauthor of The Palgrave Guide to Gothic Publishing: The Business of Gothic Fiction, 1764—1835 (to be published in 2014).

Diane Mason is an Associate Lecturer in Children's Literature with the Open University. She gained her PhD at Bath Spa University in 2003 and has contributed numerous articles and essays to journals and edited collections. Her monograph, The Secret Vice: Masturbation in Victorian Literature and Medical Culture, was published by Manchester University Press in 2008. Her research interests include Gothic and Victorian literature, medical history, nineteenth-century pornography, gender and sexuality, children's literature, and popular culture.

Anneleen Masschelein is a Lecturer in Literary Theory and Cultural Studies at the KU Leuven, Belgium and a research fellow at the Flanders Research Fund. Her monograph The Unconcept: The Freudian Uncanny in Late-Twentieth-Century Theory was published by SUNY Press in 2011. Her current research project focuses on the creative writing of contemporary theoretical authors.

Stacey McDowell is a PhD candidate at the University of Bristol.

Emma McEvoy lectures in the Department of English, Linguistics and Cultural Studies at the University of Westminster. She has published various articles on Gothic and Romantic texts and is coeditor, with Catherine Spooner, of The Routledge Companion to Gothic (2007).

Ellen McWilliams is a Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Exeter and has teaching and research interests in contemporary women's fiction and twentieth-century Irish writing. She is the author of Margaret Atwood and the Female Bildungsroman (2009). Her second book, Women and Exile in Contemporary Irish Fiction, is forthcoming with Palgrave Macmillan.

Gilles Ménégaldo is Professor of American Literature and Film Studies at the University of Poitiers. He set up the Film Studies department and was from 2002 to September 2008 President of SERCIA, a European research association on film studies. He is coauthor of Dracula, la noirceur et la gròce (with A. M. Paquet-Deyris, 2006) and has published over a hundred articles on varied topics (including many on Gothic literature and film). He has edited or coedited twenty-seven collections of essays, among them Frankenstein (1999), H. P. Lovecraft (2002), R. L. Stevenson et A. Conan Doyle, Aventures de la fiction (2003, with J. P. Naugrette), Dracula (2005), Jacques Tourneur (2006), Film and History (2008), Manières de Noir (on contemporary crime fiction) (2010), Gothic NEWS: Studies in Classic and Contemporary Gothic Cinema (2011), and Persistences gothiques dans la littérature et les arts de l'image (with Lauric Guillaud, 2012).

Helene Meyers is Professor of English and McManis University Chair at Southwestern University. She is the author of Femicidal Fears: Narratives of the Female Gothic Experience (2001), Reading Michael Chabon (2010), and Identity Papers: Contemporary Narratives of American Jewishness (2011).

Alison Milbank is Associate Professor of Literature and Theology at the University of Nottingham. She is the author of Daughters of the House: Modes of the Gothic in Victorian Fiction (1992), Dante and the Victorians (1998), and Chesterton and Tolkien as Theologians: The Fantasy of the Real (2007). She has edited Ann Radcliffe's The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne and A Sicilian Romance for the Oxford World Classics Series and recent articles have concentrated on the Gothic grotesque and on Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu. She is currently working on a theological history of the Gothic novel.

Robert Miles is Professor and Chair of the Department of English at the University of Victoria. He is the author of Ann Radcliffe: the Great Enchantress (1995), Gothic Writing 1750—1820: A Genealogy (2nd edn. 2002), Jane Austen (2003), and Romantic Misfits (2008). He is a Past-President of the International Gothic Association.

Meredith Miller is Senior Lecturer in English at University College Falmouth. Her most recent book is Female Subjects in the Fin de Siècle Novel: Modernity, Will and Desire (2013). Her Historical Dictionary of Lesbian Literature was published in 2006. She has published numerous scholarly articles on gender, sexuality, and popular fiction, and is also an active short story writer, whose work has appeared recently in Stand, Short Fiction, Prole, and The View From Here.

Nicholas Monk is Assistant Professor at the University of Warwick's Institute for Advanced Teaching and Learning. His research interests include literatures of the American Southwest, Native American literature, and literature and pedagogy. He has recently edited a collection for Routledge on intertextual and interdisciplinary approaches to Cormac McCarthy.

Nema Montezero is an independent scholar of the Gothic.

Aris Mousoutzanis is a Visiting Lecturer at the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, Kingston University. He has researched and published on areas such as critical and cultural theory (especially psychoanalysis and trauma theory); technoculture and cyberculture; media and globalization; popular culture; science fiction; and the Gothic.

Marie Mulvey-Roberts is a Reader in Literary Studies in English at the University of the West of England, Bristol, UK. She is the editor of The Handbook to the Gothic (2009), coeditor with Alison Milbank and Peter Otto of Gothic Fiction (2002—3), and author of Gothic Immortals (1990) and Dangerous Bodies: Corporeality and the Gothic (forthcoming).

Rebecca Munford is a Senior Lecturer in English Literature at Cardiff University. She has published essays on women's writing and the Gothic, neo-Victorianism, and the relationship between feminism and popular culture. The editor of Re-visiting Angela Carter: Texts, Contexts, Intertexts (2006) and coeditor of Third Wave Feminism: A Critical Exploration (2007), she is also the author of a forthcoming monograph, Decadent Daughters and Monstrous Mothers: Angela Carter and the European Gothic.

Barry Murnane graduated with a PhD from the University of Göttingen in 2006 and is currently Assistant Professor for German Literature at the Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg. He has published on Gothic writing from the eighteenth to the twentieth century and is author of Verkehr mit Gespenstern: Gothic und Moderne bei Franz Kafka (2008). He is currently preparing two edited volumes on German Gothic for publication: Populäre Erscheinungen. Der deutsche Schauerroman um 1800 (2011) and Popular Revenants. German Gothic and its International Contexts (2012).

Siobhán Ní Chonaill is a graduate of the University of Cambridge, where she completed a doctorate on constructs of immortality in the work of William Godwin. She is the author of several published papers on William Godwin and combines her academic interests with a career in policy research, where she focuses on research impact and evaluation.

Janina Nordius is Associate Professor of English Literature at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, where she has taught for many years. She has published a book on John Cowper Powys, I Am Myself Alone: Solitude and Transcendence in John Cowper Powys (1997), and several articles on Gothic works, such as Sophia Lee's The Recess and Cynric Williams' Hamel, and has edited Anna Maria Mackenzie's Swedish Mysteries for Valancourt Books (2008).

Ciarán O'Keeffe is an Applied Psychologist from Bucks New University operating on science's fringe. He has been involved in many unusual projects: the physiological effects of infrasound, ghost investigation of Hampton Court, an exorcism training day, and lie detecting for the movie Spy Game. Aside from research in parapsychology and forensic psychology, he provides a skeptical voice to paranormal shows such as Travel Channel's Most Haunted and Living TV's Jane Goldman Investigates. His paranormal research has focused on testing mediums and psychics in the laboratory and also fieldwork examining haunting experiences. Additional research has included psychic criminology and Christian parapsychology (i.e., exorcism, possession, and stigmata). Aside from academic research, which he has published and presented at numerous conferences, more recently he has participated in various documentaries with National Geographic and Discovery examining the use of psychics in criminal investigations and the role of infrasound in understanding haunting experiences, and provided accounts of his daily activities in order to inform the lead in a UK-based popular paranormal TV drama about the afterlife.

Tomos Owen is Postdoctoral Fellow in English Literature at Cardiff University. He has published articles on London-Welsh literary culture at the turn of the twentieth century, and on riots in literature.

Jimmy Packham is a research student at the University of Bristol. His primary research interest is in British and American Romanticism and the Gothic, with a particular concern for mythic and psychoanalytical readings. He is currently researching a thesis on the symbolism of the sea voyage, focused especially on the works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Mary Shelley, Edgar Allan Poe, and Herman Melville.

Paulina Palmer taught as a Sessional Lecturer for the MA in Sexuality and Gender at Birkbeck College, University of London, and before that was Senior Lecturer in the English Department at the University of Warwick, where she helped to establish and teach the MA in Women's Studies. She now works as an independent scholar. Her publications include Contemporary Women's Fiction: Narrative Practice and Feminist Theory (1989), Lesbian Writing: Dreams, Desire, Difference (1993), Lesbian Gothic: Transgressive Fictions (1999), and The Queer Uncanny: New Perspectives on the Gothic (2012). She is on the steering committee of the Contemporary Women Writers' Association.

Patrick Parrinder is the author of several books on H. G. Wells and science fiction, including Shadows of the Future, which won the 1996 Eaton Award. His Nation and Novel: The English Novel from its Origins to the Present Day was published by Oxford University Press in 2006. He is currently General Editor of the twelve-volume Oxford History of the Novel in English, and has coedited volume four in the series The Reinvention of the British and Irish Novel 1880—1940 (2011), with Andrzej Gasiorek. He is an Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Reading.

Maria Parrino is a PhD research student at the University of Bristol and a full-time teacher in a secondary school in Italy. She has published Gothic Literature (2006) and articles on Italian nineteenth-century Gothic literature.

Linden Peach is Professor in English and Dean of Arts and Humanities, University of Wales, Cardiff. He was awarded a Personal Chair in Modern Literature at Loughborough University and has taught at a number of universities including Goldsmiths College, the University of London, Bretton Hall, the University of Leeds, and the University of Gloucestershire. He has published extensively in twentieth-century and twenty-first-century literature, including books on Angela Carter, Virginia Woolf, Toni Morrison, contemporary Irish and Welsh fiction, and literature and crime. He is a Fellow of the English Association, an Honorary Research Fellow at Swansea University, and an elected member of the Welsh Academy.

Christopher Pittard is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Portsmouth. His research interests include Victorian culture, particularly popular culture of the fin de siècle, narratives of crime and detection, literary and cultural geographies, and conjuring and secular magic in literature. His Purity and Contamination in Late-Victorian Detective Fiction was published in 2011. He is a member of the editorial advisory board for The Journal of Popular Culture and an honorary fellow of the Centre for Victorian Studies at the University of Exeter.

Murray Pittock is Bradley Professor of English Literature at the University of Glasgow, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, the English Association, the Royal Historical Society, the Royal Society of Arts and the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland among other bodies. Murray's books are set on courses in English, History, Irish Studies, theology, and politics in leading universities in around twenty-five countries, and he has been awarded or shortlisted/nominated for a number of literary and historical prizes and prize lectureships. His most recent books are Robert Burns in Global Culture (2011) and the Edinburgh Companion to Scottish Romanticism (2011).

Franz J. Potter is Associate Professor at the National University. He is the author of The History of Gothic Publishing 1800—1835 (2005), founding editor of Zittaw Press, and editor of the journal Studies in Gothic Fiction.

Anna Powell is Reader in Film and English Studies at Manchester Metropolitan University. Her books include Deleuze and the Horror Film and Deleuze, Altered States and Film, and she has coedited Teaching the Gothic with Andrew Smith (2006). She has also published a range of articles and chapters on Gothic aesthetics and affect. She is the director of A/V webjournal and a member of the editorial board of Deleuze Studies.

Maria Purves is a Fellow of Lucy Cavendish College, Cambridge. She is the author of The Gothic and Catholicism: Religion, Cultural Exchange and the Popular Novel, 1785—1829 (2009) and several articles and essays on the Gothic. Her other main research interest is religion in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature.

Anita Raghunath teaches at the Vrije University Amsterdam. She is the author of The Birth of Britishness: Colonial Identity and the Nation (2009) and Carnival and Transgression in British and Caribbean Literature, 1707—1848 (2001). Other works on the colonial aspects of the Gothic are forthcoming.

Catherine Redford is a postgraduate research student at the University of Bristol. Her research interests include Romantic last man and apocalyptic literature, and the lives and works of the Shelley circle.

Faye Ringel is Professor Emerita of Humanities at the US Coast Guard Academy, New London, CT. She holds the doctorate in Comparative Literature from Brown University, Providence, RI. She is the author of New England's Gothic Literature: Folklore and History of the Supernatural and articles on the literature of the fantastic including Lovecraft, urban fantasy, and Gothic medievalism.

Julia Round lectures in the Media School at Bournemouth University and edits the academic journal Studies in Comics. She has published and presented work internationally on cross-media adaptation, the graphic novel redefinition, the application of literary criticism and terminology to comics, and the presence of Gothic and fantastic motifs and themes in this medium.

Nicholas Royle is the author of six novels, including The Director's Cut and Antwerp, as well as two novellas and a short story collection, Mortality. Born in Manchester in 1963, he runs Nightjar Press, reviews fiction for the Independent, and is a senior lecturer in creative writing at Manchester Metropolitan University.

Caroline Ruddell is Programme Director of Film and Television at St. Mary's University College at Strawberry Hill. She has published on witchcraft in television, anime, Rotoshop, and the representation of identity on screen. Caroline is currently researching the Gothic and fairy tale in popular film and television, and split personality on screen. She is Reviews Editor for the Sage publication Animation: An Interdisciplinary Journal and sits on various editorial boards.

Victor Sage is Emeritus Professor of English Literature at the University of East Anglia, Norwich. A novelist and short-story writer, he has also written on Protestantism and the horror tradition, Dickens, Beckett, and other nineteenth- and twentieth-century Irish writers. He has edited Maturin's Melmoth the Wanderer and Le Fanu's Uncle Silas for Penguin Classics. His latest book is Le Fanu's Gothic: the Rhetoric of Darkness (2004). He is currently working on A Cultural History of European Gothic for Polity Press.

Justin Sausman is Visiting Lecturer at Royal Holloway University of London and the University of Westminster. His research focuses on the interactions between science and occultism in Victorian and Modernist literature, and he is currently completing a book entitled Modernism and the Meaning of Life: Vitalism, Occultism and Literary Culture. He has published a number of articles on these topics, and is coeditor, with Roger Luckhurst, of Marginal and Occult Sciences, an anthology of Victorian writings published in 2012.

Andrew Scahill teaches at George Mason University. His current research focuses on the representation of childhood and science fiction, and he has published work on disability and eugenics, queer spectatorship, Cold War culture, children's media, Japanese cinema, and contemporary horror.

Val Scullion is an Associate Lecturer for The Open University. She has a PhD from Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge. She has published on Susan Hill's work in Gothic Studies and Women: A Cultural Review, and on E. T. A. Hoffmann's The Sandman in the Journal of Literature and Science. She has written collaboratively with Marion Treby on Hoffmann's fiction in the European Review and a forthcoming article in the Journal of Gender Studies. She has also contributed to Marie Mulvey-Roberts' The Handbook to Gothic Literature (1998).

Andy W. Smith is Academic Subject Leader for Music & Performance in the University of Wales, Newport. Publications include chapters in The Routledge Companion to Gothic (2007), Monstrous Adaptations: Generic and Thematic Mutations in Horror Film (2007), and Theatres of Catastrophe: The Theatre of Howard Barker (2006).

Catherine Spooner is Senior Lecturer in English at Lancaster University. Her publications include Fashioning Gothic Bodies (2004), Contemporary Gothic (2006) and, co-edited with Emma McEvoy, The Routledge Companion to Gothic (2007). Her latest book is Post-Millennial Gothic: Comedy, Romance and the Rise of Happy Gothic, due to be published in 2013.

Ginger Stelle recently completed her PhD in English at the University of St. Andrews, and she is currently teaching at Morthland College in West Frankfort, IL. Her primary research interests include the works of George MacDonald, particularly relating to questions of genre, and Victorian literature.

Aspasia Stephanou has recently defended her PhD thesis, entitled Our Blood, Ourselves: The Symbolics of Blood in Vampire Texts and Vampire Communities, at the University of Stirling. She has published articles and chapters on vampire communities and globalization (e.g., in Globalgothic, forthcoming); on the vampire and empire (with Glennis Byron, in The Postcolonial Vampire, 2012); on blood and performance art; and on black metal theory (e.g., in Glossator, forthcoming). She is also coeditor of a collection of essays on Transgression and Its Limits (2012). Her interests include postcontinental philosophy and philosophies of nature, and Gothic and contemporary horror narratives with a focus on blood, the vampire, and matter.

Martha Stoddard Holmes is Professor and Chair of Literature and Writing Studies and Coordinator of the Film Minor at California State University, San Marcos. Her research for the past twenty years has analyzed the cultural production of disability and illness as embodied social identities. Her publications include Fictions of Affliction (2009) and numerous articles on literature and disability.

Cynthia Sugars is an Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of Ottawa. She has published widely on postcolonialism, the Gothic, and psychoanalysis, and is the editor of Unsettled Remains: Canadian Literature and the Postcolonial Gothic (2009). Her book Canadian Gothic: Literature, History, and the Spectre of Self-Invention is forthcoming in the Gothic Literary Studies Series with the University of Wales Press.

Laurence Talairach-Vielmas is Professor of English at the University of Toulouse II. She is a specialist in Victorian literature and her research focuses on the relations between science and literature. She is the author of Wilkie Collins, Medicine and the Gothic (2009) and Moulding the Female Body in Victorian Fairy Tales and Sensation Novels (2007), and she has edited a collection of articles on the popularization of science in children's literature, Science in the Nursery: The Popularisation of Science in France and Britain, 1761—1901 (2010), as well as a late Victorian novel by Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Thou Art the Man (2008).

Ardel Thomas is currently the chair of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Studies at City College of San Francisco. She received her PhD in Modern Thought and Literature from Stanford University, where she concentrated on the intersections of race and sexuality in Victorian Gothic Horror. Ardel's monograph Queer Others in Victorian Gothic: Transgressing Monstrosity is forthcoming.

Douglass H. Thomson, Professor of Literature at Georgia Southern University, has written on British Romanticism and literary Gothicism, including Gothic Writers: A Critical and Bibliographic Guide, coedited with Frederick S. Frank and Jack Voller. His more recent focus on the Gothic ballad has led to several articles and two critical editions, Walter Scott's An Apology for Tales of Terror for the Scott Digital Archive at the University of Edinburgh, and the Broadview Tales of Wonder by M. G. Lewis. Along with Jack Voller, Thomson is currently preparing an electronic edition of the anonymous Tales of Terror (1801) for submission to Romantic Circles.

Dale Townshend is Lecturer in Gothic and Romantic Literature at the University of Stirling. In addition to a number of articles and book chapters, he is the author of The Orders of Gothic (2007). With Fred Botting he has edited four volumes in the Gothic: Critical Concepts in Literary and Cultural Studies series, and he has edited Gothic Shakespeares (2008) with John Drakakis.

Jack G. Voller is a Professor of English at Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville, where he teaches courses on Gothic and popular literature. He is the author of The Supernatural Sublime: The Metaphysics of Terror in Anglo-American Romanticism (1994) and is coauthor, with Frederick S. Frank and Douglass H. Thomson, of Gothic Writers: A Critical and Bibliographical Guide (2001); he also maintains The Literary Gothic (www.litgothic.com), a website devoted to all things connected with literary Gothicism.

Diana Wallace is Professor of English Literature at the University of Glamorgan. She is the author of The Woman's Historical Novel: British Women Writers, 1900—2000 (2005) and Sisters and Rivals in British Women's Fiction, 1914—39 (2000) and coeditor (with Andrew Smith) of The Female Gothic: New Directions (2009). Her most recent book, Female Gothic Histories: Gender, History and the Gothic, is forthcoming.

Alexandra Warwick is Head of the Department of English, Linguistics and Cultural Studies at the University of Westminster. Her research interests are in the field of nineteenth-century studies, particularly the fin de siècle. Recent publications include a monograph on Oscar Wilde (2006), a coedited collection on media, cultural, and historical representations of Jack the Ripper (2007, with Martin Willis), and a Victorian Studies Reader (2008, with Martin Willis). Her current work is on archeology and the Victorian imagination.

Roderick Watson was educated at Aberdeen University and Peterhouse, Cambridge and is Professor Emeritus at the University of Stirling. He has lectured and published widely on the poetry of Hugh MacDiarmid, Scottish literature and culture, modernism, language and identity. He currently coedits the Journal of Stevenson Studies.

Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock earned his PhD in the Human Sciences from George Washington University and is Professor of English as well as Graduate Coordinator at Central Michigan University. He is the author of The Rocky Horror Picture Show (2007), Scare Tactics: Supernatural Fiction by American Women (2008), Charles Brockden Brown (2011), and The Vampire Film: Undead Cinema (2012). In addition, he has edited scholarly collections on the films of M. Night Shyamalan, South Park, the poetry and prose of Edgar Allan Poe, The Blair Witch Project, Charlotte Perkins Gilman's short story The Yellow Wall-paper, and ghosts in American culture. Currently, he is completing work on editing four volumes of the fiction of horror author H. P. Lovecraft for Barnes & Noble and is editing the Encyclopedia of Literary and Cinematic Monsters for Ashgate Press.

John Whatley is Academic Program Director at the Centre for Online and Distance Education at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, Canada. He is an Associate Member of the Department of English and the School of Criminology. In literature his interests are in Romantic and Gothic literature, crime and literature, the literary essay, and the relation between the social sciences and literary criticism.

Helen Wheatley is Associate Professor in Film and Television Studies at the University of Warwick. She has published widely on popular genres in television drama in the UK, US, and beyond (particularly the studio-based drama of the 1960s and 1970s), and is the author of Gothic Television (2006). She also has an ongoing interest in issues of television history and historiography, a topic on which she has edited a collection of essays: Re-viewing Television History: Critical Issues in Television Historiography (2007). She is currently conducting research on spectacle and visual pleasure on television.

Jason Whittaker is Professor of Blake Studies and Head of the Department of Writing at University College Falmouth, and was formerly a technical journalist and magazine editor. He is the author of eleven books; his most recent titles include Blake 2.0: William Blake in Twentieth-Century Art, Music and Culture (2012) and Producing for Web 2.0 (2009). He is currently working on titles dealing with Blake and digital humanities, and industrial music of the 1980s and 1990s.

Anne Williams is a Professor of English Emeritus at the University of Georgia. In addition to numerous articles on Gothic and Romantic topics, she has published Prophetic Strain: The Greater Lyric in the Eighteenth Century (1984) and Art of Darkness: A Poetics of Gothic (1995). She has edited Three Vampire Tales (2003) and coedited (with Christy Desmet) Shakespearean Gothic (2010).

Martin Willis is Reader in English Literature at the University of Glamorgan. He has written widely on the relationship between science and Gothic fiction, primarily in two monographs: Mesmerists, Monsters and Machines (2007) and Vision, Science and Literature, 1870—1920 (2011).

Gina Wisker teaches Gothic Literature and Women's Writing at the University of Brighton, where she is also Head of the Centre for Learning and Teaching. Gina's books include Horror Fiction (2005), Key Concepts in Postcolonial Literature (2007), Teaching African American Women's Writing (ed., 2010), Rites of Passage (ed. with Pauline Dodgson Katiyo, 2010), Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale (2010), several essays on Nalo Hopkinson in Femspec and in Caribbean Short Stories (2011), and Margaret Atwood, An Introduction to Critical Views of Her Fiction (2012 ). She coedits the online dark fantasy and horror journal Dissections and the poetry magazine Spokes, and writes short stories and poetry.

Anne Witchard is Lecturer in English Literature in the Department of English, Linguistics and Cultural Studies at the University of Westminster. She is the author of Thomas Burke's Dark Chinoiserie: Limehouse Nights and the Queer Spell of Chinatown (2009) and Lao She, London and China's Literary Revolution (2012). With Lawrence Philips she is coeditor of London Gothic: Place, Space and the Gothic Imagination (2010).

Julian Wolfreys is Professor of Modern Literature and Culture with the Department of English and Drama at Loughborough University. Most recently the author of Literature, in Theory: Tropes, Subjectivites, Responses, and Responsibilities (2010), he is currently writing The Derrida Wordbook and a study of the representation of London in the novels of Charles Dickens.

David Worrall is Professor of English at Nottingham Trent University. He is the author of Theatric Revolution: Drama, Censorship and Romantic Period Subcultures, 1773—1832 (2006), The Politics of Romantic Theatricality: The Road to the Stage (2007), and Harlequin Empire: Race, Ethnicity and the Drama of the Popular Enlightenment (2007). He was a Leverhulme Research Fellow (2008—10).

Angela Wright is a Senior Lecturer in Romantic Literature at the University of Sheffield. She published Gothic Fiction in 2007. The Import of Terror: Britain, France and the Gothic is forthcoming from Cambridge University Press in 2013, and Mary Shelley will also be published by the University of Wales Press in 2013.

Elizabeth Wright is Senior Lecturer in English and European Literature at Bath Spa University. She has written papers on nineteenth- and twentieth-century Modernist fiction and drama and is the author of the acclaimed play Vanessa and Virginia. Future projects include articles on the work of Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group and a monograph on amateur dramatics at the fin de siècle.

Sue Zlosnik is Professor of Gothic Literature at the Manchester Metropolitan University, UK. With Avril Horner, her publications include Daphne du Maurier: Writing, Identity and the Gothic Imagination (1998), Gothic and the Comic Turn (2005), the edited collection Le Gothic: Influences and Appropriations in Europe and America (2008), and an edition of Eaton Stannard Barrett's The Heroine (2011). Alone, she has published essays on Meredith, Stevenson, Tolkien, and Palahniuk. Her most recent book is Patrick McGrath (2011). She was Joint-President of the International Gothic Association 2005—9.

Introduction

Superficially, an encyclopedia on the Gothic seems like a conceptual oxymoron. It is not fortuitous that the heyday of the encyclopedia was the Enlightenment, a period that has been commonly regarded as the backdrop against which the apparently anti-Enlightenment Gothic emerged. The Encyclopaedia Britannica was first published between 1768 and 1771, and was in part a reaction to Diderot and d'Alembert's Encylopédie (published between 1751 and 1772). The Enlightenment desire to systematize (so manifestly exemplified in the form of the encyclopedia) has conventionally been regarded as the very tendency that the Gothic works against. The Gothic pursues a seemingly messier version of what it means to be a person than that articulated in early natural philosophies and suggests that the world is a more complex place than Enlightenment science would have us believe. However, this is, of course, a simplification. The Gothic represents an attempt not to destroy coherence but to provide an alternative context within which meaning is discussed. The Gothic is thus founded on a model idea of debate and interrogation and functions as a form of radical skepticism that, paradoxically, seems to echo the Enlightenment emphasis on interrogation and testing as a way of getting at some semblance of the truth. This radical skepticism is perhaps most clearly, and famously, captured in Michel Foucault's account of his laughter on reading Jorge Luis Borges' description of a possibly fictitious Chinese encyclopedia that includes an eccentric taxonomy of the animal kingdom in which it is claimed that:

Animals are divided into: (a) belonging to the Emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) sucking pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present classification, (i) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, (l) et cetera, (m) having just broken the water pitcher, (n) that from a long way off look like flies. (Foucault 1982: xv)

Foucault's analysis of the points of contact between language, money, and natural history in The Order of Things (1970) has its roots in an analysis of a renaissance discourse of science that would underpin a later Enlightenment context. Foucault recalls:

That passage from Borges kept me laughing a long time, though not without a certain uneasiness that I found hard to shake off. Perhaps because there arose in its wake the suspicion that there is a worse kind of disorder than that of the incongruous, the linking together of things that are inappropriate. (Foucault 1982: xvii)

While this stands as an initial concern for Foucault about the links that he wishes to forge, it also stands as an implicit critique of the notion of the encyclopedia, which may, through its very inclusivity, lack any obvious underlying principle of organization. The question that Foucault poses is, "On what ‘table', according to what grid of identities, similitudes, analogies, have we become accustomed to sort out so many different and