Gothic Britain: Dark Places in the Provinces and Margins of the British Isles

Gothic Literary Studies

by William Hughes (Editor), Ruth Heholt (Editor)

Gothic Britain is the first collection of essays to consider how the Gothic responds to, and is informed by, the British regional experience. Acknowledging how the so-called United Kingdom has historically been divided upon nationalistic lines, the twelve original essays in this volume interrogate the interplay of ideas and generic innovations generated in the spaces between the nominal kingdom and its component nations and, innovatively, within those national spaces. Concentrating upon fictions depicting England, Scotland and Wales specifically, Gothic Britain comprehends the generic possibilities of the urban and the rural, of the historical and the contemporary, of the metropolis and the rural settlement – as well as exploring, uniquely, the fluid space that is the act of travel itself. Reading the textuality of some two hundred years of national and regional identity, Gothic Britain interrogates how the genre has depicted and questioned the natural and built environments of the Island of Great Britain.
 

Genres: Gothic, Nonfiction

272 pages, Hardcover

First published April 15, 2018

About the author

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.

Reviews

[Jay Rothermel]

If you like fashionable academic concepts, this is a useful book about peripheral locations of horror fiction. The title says "gothic," but that polite-company euphemism is a falling pretense as far as I am concerned. 😡

My favorite chapters:

2 The Gothic Child and the West Yorkshire Moors: The Deconstruction of Space in Jeremy Dyson’s The Haunted Book

3 ‘Spook Business’: Hall Caine and the Moment of Manx Gothic

4 ‘All those ancient stories that had their dark souls located in woods’: Rural Gothic, Scottish Folklore and Postmodern Conundrums in James Robertson’s The Testament of Gideon Mack

5 Entering the Darkness: Robert Aickman and the Regions

10 The Hammer House of Cornish Horror: The Inversion of Imperial Gothic in The Plague of the Zombies and The Reptile