Often considered the modern Walpole, Summers was a scholar, antiquarian, and necromancer who raised the dead genre of the Gothic. He argued, correctly, that the richness of these novels lie in their historical language and value. The presence of the author is removed wholly from the text by the language. As in art, it is the separation from reality that accentuates the value of subjectivity of the text rather than the ambiguities of an author's soul imprinted upon the text. If the author's presence is felt in text, it is only as a shadow.
Art is distinct and separate from the reality, and the author.
For Summers, the text is not a gauge judging the presence of the author in the text, but a form of art distinct and detached from the author. The reader is placed as the highest form of critic, they are left to themselves to apply language to the text for meaning. Summers' approach to the text helps illustrate that the beauty and the necessity of a pure read of Gothic novels lies within the reader. Psychoanalytical vocabulary has often seemed helpful also in describing the oedipal nature of the gothic, obsessed as it is with family rivalry, and with a satanically ambiguous villain whose self-sufficiency is both his glory and his damnation. . . As Gothic criticism began to incorporate psychoanalytical language as means to examine the tension of the text, the presence of the author began to invade the text.