bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Goth
Authors: Mason Diane
Published: June 2017

The original “Goths” were a warlike, Teutonic tribe who cut a swathe across Western Europe in the fourth century. Their actions not only proved to be instrumental in the collapse of a Roman Empire that was already in decline but also heralded the beginning of the Dark Ages, a tempestuous period of conflict and unrest. As a result, “Goth” became a byword for all that was savage and uncouth. One Edwardian dictionary defines a “Goth” as “a rude or uncivilized person; a barbarian; [and] one defective in taste” (Ogilvie and Annandale 1903: 325). In the later twentieth century, though, the epithet was more popularly applied to what Bess Lovejoy describes as “a subculture borne of the ashes of punk, with its heart ripped open and lots of eyeliner on” (Lovejoy 1997: 12). Goth subculture, as Lovejoy's words suggest, is an uncompromising celebration of style over substance based around music; fashion; a fascination with all things dark, morbid, and supernatural; and, for some, an interest in sexual fetishism and alternative sexual practices.
Graveyard Poetry
Authors: Voller Jack G.
Published: June 2017

The Graveyard School is a somewhat controversial label applied by Victorian and later scholars to a group of eighteenth‐century writers, primarily poets, seen as having a shared interest in a moral, didactic poetics of melancholic musings featuring “graveyard” and other macabre or supernaturalist imagery. Recent scholarship has questioned the utility or legitimacy of such a label, though the continued persistence of the term suggests it possesses some cultural value. Certainly, the writers often grouped together under the term were collectively a significant influence on the Gothic.
H
alloween

(1978)
Authors: Blake Linnie
Published: June 2017

Shot in April 1978 for a paltry $320 000, John Carpenter's
Halloween
would gross an astonishing $60 000 000 in the year of its release alone (IMDb n.d.). Not only did this success result in a series of sequels, remakes, and merchandising opportunities that would shape the history of the slasher movie subgenre, but the film's knife‐wielding mask‐wearing slayer, Michael Myers, would himself attain totemic status, spawning a host of imitators – including the masked Jason of
Friday the 13th
(1980) and the claw‐handed burns victim Freddy Kruger of
A Nightmare on Elm Street
(1984) – that would stalk the youthful imagination of film goers for more than two decades (see

friday the

13

th

(1980);

nightmare on elm street

, A (1984)).
H
odgson,
W
illiam
H
ope
Authors: Alder Emily
Published: June 2017

William Hope Hodgson (1877–1918) eludes neat classification; in a time when now‐familiar genres were still developing, Hodgson's weird fiction blends elements of Gothic, science fiction, horror, mystery, and the supernatural, most successfully in his cosmic horror and his sea fiction. Despite not achieving great fame in his lifetime, a revival of interest in Gothic and horror fiction of the period over the past four decades has contributed to an increase in attention paid to Hodgson by readers and critics. While drawing criticism for stylistic and structural flaws in his writing, Hodgson is acclaimed for his powerful visions of monstrosity, the horrors of the sea, and the terrors of a dark cosmological future.
H
ogg,
J
ames
Authors: Pittock Murray
Published: June 2017

In recent years, the Gothic has become a genre which has migrated to cultural studies, subdivided itself in terms of gender politics, and reassembled its status as a literature of terror in the contexts of a national consciousness not at ease with itself over the repressions of history, or one seeking to create a history from a
locus amoenus –
or
horribilis –
beyond the reach of historiography and the rational superstructures of imperial or state modernity. This last is the national inflection in Gothic, which has been recently applied to Scottish and Irish writing in such books as Luke Gibbons’
Gaelic Gothic
(2004) and Murray Pittock's
Scottish and Irish Romanticism
(2008) (see
irish gothic
;
scottish gothic
).
Hypnotism
Authors: Hughes William
Published: June 2017

Hypnotism is but one of several names that may be applied to a closely related range of ostensibly abnormal mental states associated for the most part with altered consciousness and the apparent abnegation of will. These analogous states include mental abstraction, lucid dreaming, induced trance (or deep relaxation), voluntary or induced somnambulism (commonly called sleepwalking), and certain varieties of catalepsy and epilepsy. When deployed within Gothic fiction, these states are usually enhanced further through a customary (though scientifically dubious) association with occult phenomena such as prescience and clairvoyance, and with suggestions of personal and sexual violations of the entranced self, the origins of which can be traced to the earliest days of systematic hypnotism in Europe.
I
nquisition, The
Authors: Purves Maria
Published: June 2017

The Inquisition came into being in or around 1233 in response to the growth of Catharism, a mystical religious movement in France that for some time had been presenting a very real threat to the Roman Catholic Church and a perceived threat to Christian society. Throughout the second half of the twelfth century, the Cathars had been persecuted for their beliefs. In pursuit of an alternative to violence, Dominic de Guzman had in 1215 set up an order of itinerant ascetic friars, skilled in theology, to persuade the Cathars to return to orthodoxy through the example of good Christian practice and debate. However, as the Cathar threat increased, Pope Gregory IX made the decision to send Dominicans into Central and Western Europe with formal authorization to “proceed against” suspected heretics “without appeal.” In this way, the Inquisition was born.
Intertext
Authors: Mandal Anthony
Published: June 2017

From its inception, the Gothic has been an intrinsically intertextual genre, reflecting a sophisticated and at times bewildering relationship to the written word. This intertextuality manifests itself in a variety of forms, including reference and allusion to antecedent works, pastiche or parody of literary traditions, and the use of stylistic and structural mechanisms, such as interpolated documents, discovered manuscripts, letters, and diegetic apparatus. This abundance of intertextual energy has granted the Gothic much of its richness, power, and longevity while accentuating its tendency toward ambiguity and excess.
J
ackson,
S
hirley
Authors: Lootens Tricia
Published: June 2017

An unsparing, even fierce, social critic; a densely allusive satirist; and a writer whose fictions draw on thorough study, both of English literature and of the Gothic tradition in all its historical manifestations, Shirley Jackson (1916–65) is perhaps best known for her short story “The Lottery.” Published in
The New Yorker
on June 26, 1948, this spare account of an annual New England village gathering, with its stunningly matter‐of‐fact culmination in ritual murder, unleashed what the author herself termed “bewilderment, speculation, and plain old‐fashioned abuse” (Jackson 1993: 128). “Anthologized, dramatized, televised, … made into a ballet,” and banned in South Africa, “The Lottery” also won immediate critical success (Jackson 1993: 128; Hyman 1966: viii). By the time Jackson's story was republished toward the close of her 1949
The Lottery; or, The Adventures of James Harris
, it seemed primed to take its part within what was, in its own time, perceived as an ambitious and largely successful literary career (Hattenhauer 2003: 1–2).
JapaneseGothic
Authors: Ancuta Katarzyna
Published: June 2017

The term “Japanese Gothic” is perhaps most commonly used in association with the contemporary Goth‐related popular culture of Japan, as represented by J‐Goth music, manga and anime, and Goth‐related fashions and sub‐cultural lifestyles, epitomized by the so‐called Gothic Lolita – a street fashion style usually associated with the Harajuku region of Tokyo that has managed to gain a considerable following worldwide. Although the Gothic Lolita style undeniably derives from Western Gothic aestheticism, it remains expressive of local cultural values, some of its specifically Japanese references including the Visual Kei transgender musical movement, where musicians dress in elaborate costumes and apply intricate makeup; the culture ofshōjo(young girls) emphasizing sweet innocence and close emotional relationships between women in a world free from men; as well asrori‐kon(orloli‐con) –the Nabokov‐inspired “Lolita complex” referring to middle‐aged men's fascination with young girls and to the style adopted by women willing to personify that particular fantasy. The Japanese Lolita style is rather complex; Vera Mackie (2009) lists five most significant Lolita sub‐groups:Kuro‐Rori(Black Lolita),Ama‐Rori(Sweet Lolita),Guro‐Loli(Grotesque Lolita),Gosu‐Pan(Gothic Punk), andRori‐Pan(Punk Lolita) and concludes that although the fashion is frequently simplified as containing references to “Victorian” or “Rococo” aesthetics, these references are not meant to be accurate but rather suggest a mood of archaic romance. Mackie (2009) quotes Takahara Eiri's description of Japanese Gothic sensibility as “essentially a variation on the heritage of the past […] which has never actually existed.” This allows us to find parallels between the Gothic Lolita style and other forms of “costume play” (kosu‐pureorcosplay), cross‐dressing theatrical performances of the all‐girl Takarazuka Revue, or the stylistic extravagance of the Visual Kei musicians incorporating elements of Glam Rock, Punk, and Goth, with a touch of Japanese manga, geisha, and the samurai.
JewishGothic
Authors: Gilbert Ruth
Published: June 2017

Stories about three legendary Jewish figures – the dybbuk, the golem, and the Wandering Jew – all invoke a classically Gothic mixture of fear, horror, and desire. They also present patterns of uncanny doubling and dislocation and an interrogation of the concepts of home and homelessness, belonging and alienation, in ways that suggest a mode that might be described as “the Jewish Gothic.”
Kafka,Franz
Authors: Packham Jimmy
Published: June 2017

In the work of Franz Kafka (1883–1924), much of it published posthumously, the Gothic is to be found principally in the nightmarish qualities of the labyrinthine narrative developments and the psychological and physical frustrations inflicted on characters by impenetrable bureaucracies. So distinctive is Kafka's treatment of these themes that the term “Kafkaesque,” coined by Cecil Day Lewis in 1938, is used to describe any scenario resembling those of Kafka's literature, and has secured for Kafka a niche within Gothic writing.
K
ing,
S
tephen
Authors: Williams Anne
Published: June 2017

Stephen King (1947–) is the most prolific contemporary writer of Gothic fiction, and arguably the most significant. As of 2011, he has published approximately fifty novels, nine collections of short stories, seven graphic novels, seven screenplays, eight teleplays, four e‐books, and two nonfiction works,
Danse Macabre
(1979) on horror in various media, and the autobiographical
On Writing
(2000). Forty‐five of his works have been made into theatrical films and twenty‐two adapted for television, not including sequels. Early novels such as
‘Salem's Lot
(1975) or
Pet Sematary
(1983) appeal primarily to the consumers of conventional horror in all media. But Brian De Palma's
Carrie
(1976) and Stanley Kubrick's
The Shining
(1980) are among the best horror movies ever made, and in 1990 Kathy Bates won an Oscar for best actress in
Misery
(see
film
). King has received forty‐eight literary awards and in 2003 the Medal for Distinguished Contributions to American Letters from the National Book Foundation.
K
ipling,
R
udyard
Authors: Hughes William
Published: June 2017

Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936) was born in the Indian city of Bombay (now Mumbai). Though educated initially in a domestic environment on the Subcontinent, frequently through the agency of native servants, he received his formal schooling in England between 1871 and 1882. He returned to India in 1882, to work as a reporter for the
Civil and Military Gazette
, a newspaper based in Lahore in modern‐day Pakistan, and later for
The Pioneer
in Allahabad. At this time he began publishing short fiction in the provincial press and longer works within an ephemeral, but voluminous, series of paperbacks known as the Indian Railway Library. Kipling's short fiction from this period was later collected into volumes which remain in print to the present day: these include
Departmental Ditties
(1886),
Plain Tales from the Hills
(1888),
Soldiers Three
(1890), and
Wee Willie Winkie
(1890). His schoolboy recollections of the United Services College in Devon, which he attended between 1878 and 1882, informed the collection
Stalky & Co
. (1899).
L
ewis,
M
atthew
Authors: McEvoy Emma
Published: June 2017

Matthew Lewis (1775–1818) was born in London on July 9, 1775. He was the oldest of the four children of Frances Maria and Matthew Lewis, and the heir to his father's large fortune. Lewis senior was Deputy‐Secretary at the War Office and the owner of two slave plantations in Jamaica (see
slavery and the gothic
). Shortly after Lewis' sixth birthday his mother left her husband's house and ran off with a music master named Samuel Harrison. The probable result of this union was the birth of a daughter, a Miss Lacey who was provided for in Mrs. Lewis' will. When Mrs. Lewis was traced she was compelled to leave her lover. Lewis' father tried in vain to obtain a divorce; however, though estranged from his wife, he continued to support her financially.
L
ugosi,
B
ela
Authors: Byron Glennis
Published: June 2017

Bela Lugosi (1882–1956), the actor who became synonymous with Dracula, was born Béla Ferenc Dezsö Blaskó on October 20, 1882 in Lugos, Hungary, now a part of Romania. While many of the details of his early life are difficult to establish, given that Lugosi had a notable penchant for embellishment, it appears that Lugosi's acting career began when he became connected with the Franz Joseph Theater of Temesvar in the early 1900s, taking on various small roles and singing in operettas. He subsequently travelled with various repertory companies, playing the title role in Byron's
Manfred
(see
byron, george gordon, sixth baron
) and Antonio in
The Merchant of Venice
and, in 1910, the lead in
Romeo and Juliet
. Moving to Budapest in 1911, he began using the name Lugosi, which was based on the name of his hometown, and debuted as Vronsky in
Anna Karenina
. In 1912 he attended a private acting school and, by now a box‐office draw, made his debut with the National Theater of Hungary in 1913. With the outbreak of war in 1914, Lugosi enlisted, serving in the Royal Hungarian Infantry until 1916, when he returned to the theater. The first of his five marriages, to a banker's daughter, took place in 1917. In this year he also began to act in films: his first was
The Leopard
, for which his name was changed to Arisztid Olt.
Magazines
Authors: Smith Andy W.
Published: June 2017

Magazines associated with Goth subculture have, over the last twenty years, been an important element of defining the different contexts and styles associated with that particular subculture. The development of a Goth subculture derived from literary and cultural tropes of the Gothic has been well documented by a number of academics and writers (e.g., Dunja Brill, Joshua Gunn, Paul Hodkinson, Catherine Spooner). The term Goth itself is fraught with ambivalence and ambiguity, especially when applied to the construction of different subcultures within society (seegoth). As Catherine Spooner points out, “While all subcultural identities are based on the process of ‘making monstrous' – fashioning themselves as different from mainstream culture – goth in particular is situated within a significatory space in which metaphors of monstrosity abound” (Spooner 2007: 153). These “monstrous” identities, based as they are on certain Gothic literary icons, can be further traced through the development of magazines, fanzines, e‐zines, blogs, and websites that are devoted to exploring what being a Goth means as defined by contemporary cultural norms. The power of Gothic appropriation can be seen in the constantly evolving remediation of Goth identity in various forms of print and internet media.
M
atheson,
R
ichard
Authors: Carver Stephen
Published: June 2017

Richard Burton Matheson (1926–) is a prolific American novelist and short‐story and script writer responsible for some of the most iconic horror and science fiction produced after World War II. Matheson favors Gothic narratology, often in a contemporary setting with a notional science‐fiction frame. To liken his influence on the postwar Gothic, across media, to Poe's on the nineteenth‐century form would not be an understatement, and many modern masters of horror, most notably Stephen King and George A. Romero, cite Matheson as both influence and inspiration. King has argued that Matheson represents “the birth of a new breed of American fantasists” and “the break from the Lovecraftian fantasy that had held sway over serious American writers of horror for two decades or more” (King 1981: 348–9). When Tim Burton discusses the influence of Poe in his early work, he is, in fact, referring to Matheson's screenplay adaptations for American International Pictures (Salisbury 1995: 16–17).
M
aturin,
C
harles
R
obert
Authors: Townshend Dale
Published: June 2017

Though by no means exclusively a Gothic writer, the reputation of Charles Robert Maturin (1782–1824) today rests largely upon
Bertram, or, The Castle of St. Aldobrand
(1816) and
Melmoth the Wanderer
(1820), the two Gothic masterpieces he produced in the mid‐to‐later years of his literary career. Maturin was born in Dublin on September 25, 1780. During the late seventeenth century, Maturin's Huguenot ancestors had fled France for Ireland under the threat of religious persecution, when Louis XIV revoked with the Edict of Fontainebleau the earlier Edict of Nantes, the 1598 Bill of Henry IV that had granted considerable rights and freedoms to Protestants (see
protestantism
) within an otherwise predominantly Catholic country (see
roman catholicism
). Despite the Catholicism of their adoptive Ireland, the Maturin family, once repatriated, maintained its ardent Protestant affiliations: a relative of Maturin had been Dean of Killala, and Maturin's grandfather, Gabriel James Maturin, had succeeded Jonathan Swift at the Deanery of St. Patrick's Cathedral. The fifteen‐year‐old Charles entered Trinity College, Dublin in 1795, matriculating from that institution with a Bachelor of Arts in 1800. In 1803, Maturin was ordained into the Church of Ireland, a province of the Anglican community, and in October of the same year he married the accomplished singer Henrietta Kingsbury, also of a Protestant clerical background; together, the couple would bear and raise four children. Although shortly after his admission to the Church Maturin was appointed to the position of curate in the rural parish of Loughrea, County Galway, he spent very little time there, choosing instead to divide his time between Dublin and Cloghan Castle in Western Ireland. In 1805, Maturin became curate at St. Peter's Parish, Dublin, a post that he would retain until his death on October 30, 1824.
Medicine and the Gothic
Authors: Hughes William
Published: June 2017

In “Plato's Pharmacy” (1972), Jacques Derrida makes the perplexing assertion that the Greek word “pharmakon” may signify both “medicine” and “poison.” Derrida's point is that rhetoric is something akin to ingesting a pharmakon or medical substance. Such subtle interventions into the mental or physical economy of the self, whether they be absorbed in the form of ideas or consumed as a literal antidote or poison, are apt to divert the reader or the patient away from his or her current course of being or thinking. They may pervert the hitherto healthy processes of body and mind, or else crucially correct some potentially destructive fault in corporeal being or perceptive abstraction. Pharmaka are at once both cure and its opposite.
Mediumship
Authors: O'Keeffe Ciarán
Published: June 2017

Mediumship is the alleged ability of certain individuals, called mediums, to communicate with the dead. Traditionally the relaying of messages received during such a communication occurs in a setting where the intended recipient is present, for example, a séance (see
spiritualism
), a one‐to‐one private sitting, a spiritualist church or theater (known as a “demonstration of mediumship”), and more recently in ostensibly haunted buildings (see
apparition
). Today, some mediums can be found giving messages on various television programs and providing readings via phone lines and through the internet.
Misogyny
Authors: Meyers Helene
Published: June 2017

Although the Gothic is a notoriously slippery and diverse genre, its preoccupation with otherness is foundational. The othering of women and, by extension, the feminine is often explored in Gothic texts; thus, misogyny – the hatred and fear of women endemic to Western culture – is illuminated, reinforced, critiqued, and subverted by and through Gothic literary traditions.
N
ew
E
ngland Gothic
Authors: Ringel Faye
Published: June 2017

New England Gothic, like other manifestations of the American Gothic, encompasses supernatural and explained phenomena, ghosts, witches, and monsters as well as inbred families, guilty secrets, and monsters in human shape (see
american gothic
). New England's Gothic history, folklore, and literature combine nostalgia for a medieval or colonial golden age with the stronger belief that from the past comes horror and evil.
Nightmare on Elm Street, A
(1984)
Authors: Balmain Colette
Published: June 2017

“American Gothic, like Gothic more generally, is haunted by history. Often framed in terms of institutional power and oppression, Gothic records the pleasures and costs of particular social systems.”
O
ates,
J
oyce
C
arol
Authors: Cologne‐Brookes Gavin
Published: June 2017

Joyce Carol Oates (1938–) states in (
Woman) Writer
(1988: 6) that writers are vampires of their own lives, so – as one might expect – her extensive body of work in numerous genres includes plenty in the Gothic mode. Her novels written under two pseudonyms, Rosamond Smith and Lauren Kelly, routinely make use of the doppelganger (see
doubles
), but varieties of the Gothic are just as prevalent in the more than fifty novels and more than thirty story collections that she has produced alongside volumes of essays, poetry, and plays.
Poison
Authors: Mulvey‐Roberts Marie
Published: June 2017

“Poison is in everything and no thing is without poison. The dosage makes it either a poison or a remedy” (Paracelsus, quoted by Cuthbert 2001: 548). The permeable boundary between poison and medicine (seemedicine and the gothic) is reflected in the indeterminacy of Jacques Derrida's reading of Plato's use ofpharmakonas poison or cure (1981: 117–19). Less ambiguous was the use of hemlock for state executions, as in the case of Socrates, by the ancient Greeks, who attributed poisonous plants to Hecate, the goddess of witchcraft. The earliest texts on poison were by the Greek herbalist Nicander, who was the main source of toxicology until the Renaissance. By then, Magister Sautes de Ardoynis in hisThe Book of Venoms(1424) was listing as poisons: aconite, leopard's gall, mandrake, opium, and even menstrual blood, which according to twentieth‐century pseudo‐science contained meno‐toxins.
Popular Culture
Authors: Spooner Catherine
Published: June 2017

Popular culture is generally understood to refer to the culture of “the people” as opposed to that of the ruling classes; it exists outside the “authorized,” “official,” or intellectually legitimized culture of any period. In the twentieth century, it came to be associated with “mass” culture, but prior to industrialization and the rise of consumer capitalism it was often localized and particular. The Gothic novel has always been viewed as a “popular” genre: it is noncanonical, eschews notions of literary value, and is concerned with a mass readership. Very few Gothic authors or texts were accorded literary respectability until the literary canon was challenged by feminist and Marxist scholars in the 1970s. Select Gothic novels are now commonplace on school and university syllabi and have thus been incorporated into “official” culture, but this belies the reputation of Gothic throughout most of its history.
Poststructuralism and the Gothic
Authors: Wolfreys Julian
Published: June 2017

“Poststructuralism” is conventionally understood by many critics as an academic category that defines an approach to interdisciplinary scholarship. This, in turn, draws from a variety of discourses and disciplines – chiefly linguistics, semiotics, psychoanalysis, certain Marxist and feminist “theories” and epistemoideological models, and particular branches of continental philosophy – in the formal (hence the “structural” in “poststructural”) and sometimes historical or material (these are contentious terms for the more empirically minded) analysis of aesthetic objects, chiefly texts of various kinds. At best, poststructuralism might, in the words of Jane Tompkin, “be described as a challenge to the accepted model of reading and criticism” (1988: 733). Tompkin goes on to argue that poststructuralism “collapses” the “discrete entities” of reader, method, text, and interpretation, into a “single, continuous act of interpretation,” all becoming “part of a single, evolving field of discourse” (1988: 733). It does this, moreover, by insisting that reader or subject and text are “culturally constituted by interpretive frameworks or interpretive strategies that our culture makes available to us, and these […] are the only way that we have of conceiving who we are or of having a self” (1988: 734). What goes for us goes for the literary text and the world in which we live.
R
adcliffe,
A
nn
Authors: Townshend Dale
Published: June 2017

As significant as Horace Walpole's originating gestures in
The Castle of Otranto
(1764) undoubtedly were, it was Ann Radcliffe (1764–1823), more than any other writer, who consolidated, enriched, and developed the Gothic mode in British fiction during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. For many, in fact, her name was synonymous with the “first wave” of Gothic writing in its entirety: as Sir Walter Scott in his retrospective appraisal of her work in 1826 put it, “Mrs Radcliffe has a title to be considered as the first poetess of romantic fiction” (Williams 1970: 103); of all authors, Scott continued, Ann Radcliffe had the most decided claim “to take her place among the favoured few, who have been distinguished as the founders of a class, or school” (Williams 1970: 110). In famously dubbing her as “the Shakespeare of Romance Writers,” Nathan Drake in his
Literary Hours: Or, Sketches Critical and Narrative
(1798) praised the writer in the most rapturous terms possible: Ann Radcliffe was to Gothic romance what the national Bard was to the institution of English letters. Drake's assessment was by no means an isolated case: Samuel Taylor Coleridge's review of
The Mysteries of Udolpho
published in
Critical Review
in August 1794 cited a four‐line extract from Thomas Gray's “The Progress of Poesy: A Pindaric Ode” in order to argue that, though “such were the presents of the Muse to the infant Shakespeare,” and although “perhaps to no other mortal has she been so lavish of her gifts, the keys referring to the third line [“Of horror, that and thrilling fears”] Mrs. Radcliffe must be allowed to be completely in possession of” (361). Radcliffe's ability to conjure up the responses of horror, terror, fear, and suspense was seemingly as effective as Shakespeare's own. In Thomas De Quincey's words, Radcliffe was “The Great Enchantress” (1862: 74) and, as countless published responses to her work attest, this perception of the writer's almost supernatural powers of description seems to have prevailed among most of her contemporary readers. Even T. J. Mathias, though a vociferous critic of the Gothic productions of Matthew Lewis, Charlotte Smith, and others in his four‐volume satire
The Pursuits of Literature
(1794–7), would pay encomiastic tribute to Radcliffe in the fourth book as “the mighty magician of THE MYSTERIES OF UDOLPHO, bred and nourished by the Florentine Muses in their sacred solitary caverns, amid the paler shrines of Gothic superstition, and in all the dreariness of inchantment [sic]” (Mathias 1799: 58). Radcliffe's apparent mastery of Gothic fictional technique, coupled with her stature as the most original but also the most frequently translated, imitated, adapted, and plagiarized romancer of the 1790s, reduced to silence even those critics who, like Coleridge, Mathias, and Scott, railed elsewhere against what they perceived to be the Gothic mode's disastrous aesthetic, subjective, sociological, and political effects.
R
iddell,
C
harlotte
Authors: Fisher Benjamin F.
Published: June 2017

Fluctuating literary tastes create irony regarding the works of Charlotte Riddell (1832–1906). While she lived, Riddell's novels, mainly nonsupernatural fiction about urban commercial life, received the greatest attention. Since the late twentieth century her supernatural fiction (short stories and novellas) has attracted the most attention, almost as if the novels were not worth notice. Riddell numbers among several Victorian women who published Gothic tales (see
ghost stories
). She obviously turned to and published such writing, from the late 1860s on through several decades, for financial remuneration. Her ghostly fiction surpasses the huge numbers of weird tales aimed at thrilling readers eager for customary Christmas‐story fare, but insufficiently artistic for lasting appeal. Research concerning Riddell is sometimes baffling because initially she used pseudonyms: R. V. M. Sparling, F. G. Trafford, Rainey Hawthorne. Later, she could not remember precisely what she had published or where a given item may have first appeared.
RomanCatholicism
Authors: Sage Victor
Published: June 2017

Catholicism (from Greekkatholikos, meaning “universal”) signifies an all‐embracing system of belief. The epithet Roman means “at Rome”: it is used in two principal ways. First, it denotes the symbolic and literal geographical center of Western (Latin) Christianity, founded on the association with St. Peter, the disciple of Christ, martyred and buried at Rome, which marks it off from Greek Catholicism, based originally in Byzantium (later Constantinople). Second, the post‐Reformation significance of “Roman” refers metonymically to a specific set of established orthodoxies, and a specific authority structure, headed by the Pope in Rome. What follows below, for historical reasons, will be mainly using the second, post‐Reformation sense. The adjective form “Roman,” however, connotes one or two other things, worth noting, for example the Latin civilization of the ancient world (Republic and Empire), and so the term often gives to Catholicism an implicit connection to imperial tradition, and the post‐imperial geography of Europe, which is frequently present in the second sense above. The long history of the early Catholic Church is a search for a (literal and figurative) territory of absolute, imperial authority against schism and heresy (MacCulloch 2009: 78–228) which the advent of Protestantism from 1517 onwards tempered, through war and conflict, into a narrower, more defensive phase of dogma (seeprotestantism).
Romanticism
Authors: Hogle Jerrold E.
Published: June 2017

For most historians, “Romanticism” describes several coterminous movements, not always in agreement, in England and much of Europe between the early 1780s and the late 1830s (with American variations coming somewhat later) that encompassed literature, the visual arts, music, philosophy, criticism, and even political reform. These movements shared a renewed “faith” in the transformative and emotional power of the individual and collective imaginations generally reminiscent of “the marvelous, the imaginative, and the unashamedly fictitious” in the old narrative “romances” of “the Middle Ages and the Renaissance” (Eichner 1972: 11). Since Cervantes'Don Quixote(1605, 1615) had parodied the conventions of medieval quest romance, the adjective “romantic,” first used in the West around 1650, was often employed pejoratively and connected with the “improbability of the world of romance,” given the latter's penchant for supernatural interventions into earthly endeavors and the exaggerations of “normal” human behavior in its idyllic adventures (Eichner 1972: 4–5). But certain positive associations connected with “romantic” (such as “extravagantly devoted, chivalrous, [faithfully] naïve”) never really died out, and these became linked quite positively, in the course of the eighteenth century, with the “picturesque” of the landscape painters of France and Italy – for many the “regions of romance” from which the old quests came – ranging from Nicholas Poussin (1594–1665) to Claude Lorrain (1600–82) and Salvator Rosa (1615–73) (Eichner 1972: 5–8). This sort of “picturesque,” in which ruins and figures from legend often appeared in intensifications of the current natural world, combined a “sense of the past” always lingering nostalgically with “intimations of the infinite” that lent “spiritual” suggestions to an already idealized physicality (Eichner 1972: 8). By 1749–50, then, the poet William Collins in England could describe as explicitly “romantic” the scenes he previews for a fellow poet from Scotland as the latter journeys home: “‘Tis Fancy's land to which thou sett'st thy feet; / Where still, ‘tis said, the faery people meet / Beneath each birken shade on mead and hill” and “Such airy beings awe the untutored swain” that “thy sweet muse [can] the rural faith sustain” (Collins, “Ode on the Popular Superstitions of the Highlands of Scotland” in Clery and Miles 2000: 41–6).
Ruins
Authors: Hoeveler Diane Long
Published: June 2017

“I dote on ruins,” says a character in Eliza Parsons'
Lucy
(1794), “there is something sublime and awful in the sight of decayed grandeur, and large edifices tumbling to pieces” (Parsons 1794: I, 233). The mania for Gothic ruins in novels written during the late‐eighteenth and early‐nineteenth centuries can be said to be bookended by two specific historical events: the dissolution of the monasteries throughout Britain by Henry VIII from 1535 to 1539 and the excavation of Pompeii and Herculaneum that began in earnest in 1748. The first event, with its architectural and religious focus, led to a surfeit of passages in Gothic novels about melancholy, nostalgia, and mourning over lost beliefs and traditions. The second event, with its scientific bravado and sense of discovering and decoding the secrets of lost worlds, led to a desire for acquisition, power, and mastery over the external world, qualities that spoke to an emerging capitalistic and bourgeois spirit interested in acquiring status‐markers. The author of the first Gothic novel, Horace Walpole, toured Herculaneum in 1740 and was impressed with how thoroughly intact it was. In fact, he contrasted the lost city to Rome, where most of the discoveries had been “made in a barbarous age, where they only ransacked the ruins in quest of treasure” (Walpole 1948: 18, in a letter to West, June 14, 1740, sent from Naples). In contrast, Walpole was pleased that the city was being preserved as a historical relic, at least it seemed that way initially. Respect for preserving the vestiges of the past was one thing; commodification of architectural ruins as prestigious status‐markers became increasingly the motivating factor in the construction of his faux medieval estate Strawberry Hill (see
walpole, horace
). The prominence of the Gothic ruin in British Gothic literary works has long been explained as part of the drive toward the numinous or a manifestation of the Burkean dimension of the sublime (see
sublime, the
). For instance, in his
General Character of the Gothic Literature and Art
(1818), Coleridge observed that:
S
candinavian
G
othic
Authors: Leffler Yvonne
Published: June 2017

There is a Gothic tradition in Scandinavian literature, lasting from the early nineteenth century to the present day, where the stories are located in Scandinavia, and the Gothic castle or haunted house is replaced by the Nordic wilderness, the vast dark forest, the snow‐covered Nordic mountains, or the icy stormy sea. Regional folklore and local traditions are used to enhance the Gothic atmosphere, and the protagonist's dark side is often bound to and triggered by the wilderness and the pagan past of the region.
Sensibility
Authors: Wright Elizabeth
Published: June 2017

Sensibility was a fashionable concept in philosophy and literature that was largely confined to the second half of the eighteenth century. It arose as a reaction to the emotional austerity of Augustan logic and reason and was a precursor to the Romantics, though Northrop Frye argues for seeing the age as having its own “distinct kind of aesthetic” (1956: 144). Works that fall into the “age of sensibility” are also called “sentimental” and many critics use the terms interchangeably.
S
helley,
M
ary
W
ollstonecraft
Authors: Wright Angela
Published: June 2017

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1797–1851) was the author of six novels,
Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus
(1818, 1831),
Valperga
(1823),
The Last Man
(1826),
The Fortunes of Perkin Warbeck
(1830),
Lodore
(1835), and
Falkner
(1837). Besides these longer works, she also produced one novella,
Mathilda
(1819), and numerous essays and shorter pieces. Born in 1797, she was the daughter of the author, political campaigner, feminist, and educationalist Mary Wollstonecraft and the author and philosopher William Godwin (see
godwin, william
). Wollstonecraft died ten days after giving birth from complications related to the birth. The subsequent childhood and adolescence of Mary Shelley were somewhat peripatetic in nature. Godwin remarried a widow called Mrs. Clairmont in 1801. With the two children that the new Mrs. Godwin brought from her previous marriage, the son that she and Godwin had together, and Mary Wollstonecraft's older daughter, Fanny, the household became overcrowded and fractious. Reportedly, Mary often felt sidelined by her stepmother, and grew to idealize her dead mother. Her adolescence involved a spell in a boarding school and two lengthy stays in Scotland with the family of Godwin's friend William Baxter. In 1812, Mary met her father's young acolyte Percy Bysshe Shelley in the family home in London (see
shelley, percy bysshe
). In spite of, or perhaps because of, her father's vehement opposition to the match, she eloped to the continent with Shelley in July 1814, and then later married him in December 1816. Between 1812 and 1822, the year of Percy Shelley's accidental death, the couple led a nomadic existence, moving between England, Italy, and Switzerland. There were a number of pregnancies for Mary during that decade too, but only one child (Percy Florence) survived to maturity.
Sinclair,May
Authors: Wallace Diana
Published: June 2017

A transitional figure bridging the shift from Victorianism to Modernism, May Sinclair (the pseudonym of Mary Amelia St. Clair) (1863–1946) produced some of the most innovative ghost stories of the early twentieth century. HerUncanny Stories(1923) engaged with the new insights of Freud, Jung, and Einstein to rework traditional forms, using the supernatural to explore and illuminate psychic states and internal consciousness. A successful and widely respected novelist, short story writer, poet, and philosopher in her own time, she was also an astute and generous critic who championed the work of some of the earliest Modernist writers, including H. D. (Hilda Doolittle), Ezra Pound, and T. S. Eliot (seemodernism). It was Sinclair who introduced the term “stream of consciousness” into critical discourse in a 1918 review of Dorothy Richardson'sPilgrimage(Sinclair 1990).
Slasher Movies
Authors: Byron Glennis
Published: June 2017

Slasher films were arguably the most influential and certainly the most commercially successful form of horror to appear during the late 1970s and early 1980s. While precursors of the slasher have been identified in such films as Alfred Hitchcock's
Psycho
(1960), Tobe Hooper's
The Texas Chain Saw Massacre
(1974), and Bob Clark's
Black Christmas
(1974), as well as in the Italian
giallo
of Mario Bava and Dario Argento, it is John Carpenter's
Halloween
(1978) that is generally agreed to have inaugurated the form (see

halloween

(1978)).
Slavery and the Gothic
Authors: Nordius Janina
Published: June 2017

The trauma of slavery has been a persistent presence in British and American Gothic fiction from soon after the genre's inception. On both sides of the Atlantic, the rise of the Gothic largely coincided in time with the upsurge of the abolitionist movements, but, due to the different histories of Britain and the United States, slavery Gothic developed along different paths in the two countries (seerace). In Britain, where many families owned properties worked by slaves in the Caribbean sugar colonies, the debate over slavery began to gain momentum in the 1780s, resulting in the abolition of the Atlantic slave trade in 1807 and, in 1833, an act abolishing slavery altogether in the British Empire. In the United States, where slavery existed within the country's own borders, the Atlantic trade was outlawed in 1808, but it was not until the 1830s that the antislavery movement grew to become an influential force, and it took another three decades and a civil war before slavery itself was finally abolished in 1865.
Spectrality
Authors: Wolfreys Julian
Published: June 2017

Spectrality appears a straightforward term, the normative sense of which has to do with ghosts. Along with ghosts come phantoms, phantasms, spooks, poltergeists, apparitions, and, less commonly, revenants. There is an entire “family,” as it were, of specters, various species belonging to the genushaunting(seeapparition). Hardly a concept, the notion of spectrality employed in critical discourse has developed from the work of Jacques Derrida, most prominently hisSpecters of Marx(1994). To consign the specter, as trope and analytical figure, to this work alone though, is to miss the persistence of the spectral, and of quasi‐related figures such as ghosts, phantoms, phantasms, revenants,arrivants, the Other, and the idea of a “hauntology” in general throughout Derrida's writing, at least sinceDissemination, published much earlier thanSpecters(seepostructuralism and the gothic;theory).
Spiritualism
Authors: O'Keeffe Ciarán
Published: June 2017

Spiritualism is generally concerned with the belief that spirits of the dead can communicate with the living. It also specifically refers to a religion that began in the late 1840s in North America and that centers on the same premise, that of spirit communication, albeit communication facilitated by mediums (see
mediumship
) in addition to other guiding principles. These principles, which set the founding philosophy of spiritualists, include, among others, the belief that there is life after death (the continuous existence of the human soul), a belief in our own personal responsibility, and a belief in God. In the beginning of the twenty‐first century spiritualist churches could be found throughout the United Kingdom (about 350 churches), United States (about 100 churches at a conservative estimate), Australia, New Zealand, and Canada. Although the religion began in the 1840s following the establishment of intelligent communication with a spirit entity through rappings (i.e., knocking sounds of no apparent natural origin), there are particular figures that feature earlier in the history of spiritualism due to similar beliefs in, and searching for, proof of an afterlife. Such figures include Emanuel Swedenborg, an eighteenth‐century Swedish scientist, theologian, and astronomer, who famously made a transition from scientist to mystic as a result of his widely reported visions, spiritual insights, and messages from the spirit world. Franz Mesmer is also considered an important precursor since the development of his trance‐inducing technique, Mesmerism, often caused participants to describe contact with otherworldly beings (see
hypnotism
). Swedenborg's name appears again in the history of spiritualism due to a young American medium by the name of Andrew Jackson Davis who allegedly made contact with him through trance. Davis combined the tenets of Swedenborg and Mesmer by receiving many spirit messages from the former and practicing and lecturing extensively about the latter. It is possible Edgar Allan Poe (see
poe, edgar allan
) was inspired by Davis in writing “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar” since it is documented that he attended many of Davis' lectures on mesmerism (Sova 2001: 85).
S
tevenson,
R
obert
L
ouis
Authors: Watson Roderick
Published: June 2017

Robert Louis Stevenson's (1850–94) deeper engagements with the Gothic link to a specifically Scottish cultural genealogy, looking back to an oral tradition of supernatural encounters, to the terrors of Calvinist guilt and predestination, and to the tales of the Covenanting martyrs that were told to him as a sickly child by his nurse Alison Cunningham (see
scottish gothic
;
supernatural, the
). This is not to underestimate his adult appreciation of the genre as a professional writer of romance, nor the influence of his period's contemporary anxieties and his own darker and more personal fascinations (see Beattie 2009), all of which are evident in the mature work of the mid‐to‐late 1880s.
S
toker,
B
ram
Authors: Hughes William
Published: June 2017

Abraham Stoker junior (1847–1912) was born into a Protestant family, resident in the north Dublin suburb of Clontarf. His father was a minor official in the British civil administration of Ireland, though as the recent scholarship of Paul Murray (2004) has indicated, the family's Irish antecedents predate the Act of Union and connect this self‐confessed liberal advocate of paternalistic Victorian Home Rule to a more militant eighteenth‐century nationalism. Educated initially at home and later at a Dublin day school run by an Anglican clergyman, the young author was inducted into the rituals and tenets of a common masculine identity that connected the middle and upper classes of Irish society with their English counterparts. The educative ideal of
mens sana in corpore sano
– a healthy mind within a healthy body – which Stoker proudly espoused as his personal credo in his 1906 biography of the actor Sir Henry Irving, functions as a perplexing parallel to the writer's own youth and adolescence. A sickly child, at one stage blind and certainly unable to stand upon his own feet as an infant, Stoker grew to be a successful college athlete, and maintained his interest in athletics, rugby football, and weightlifting when he himself entered the Irish Civil Service in 1866. That said, his university career at Trinity College Dublin, where he was associated with Willie and Oscar Wilde and John Butler Yeats, was academically undistinguished. Though he did achieve recognition in the debating chamber, and was – uniquely – appointed both Auditor of the University's Historical Society and President of the rival Philosophical Society, he did not graduate with “Honors in pure Mathematics” as he was later to claim, and his MA was awarded, as is customary at Dublin, Oxford, and Cambridge, without further study.
Sublime, The
Authors: Fincher Max
Published: June 2017

One of the most significant intellectual influences upon the development of Gothic literature was a renewed exploration of the concept of the Sublime in eighteenth‐century aesthetics and philosophy. Early Enlightenment critics like Joseph Addison and John Dennis re‐examined the principles of the Sublime, first described by a Greek critic (possibly the third‐centuryceCassius Longinus or the first‐centuryceDionysius of Halicarnassus) in a treatise “On the Sublime” (Longinus 2004). However, by far the most influential study for Gothic writing was a popular work by the philosopher and Tory politician Edmund Burke,A Philosophical Enquiry into Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful(1757).