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This chapter talks about how the Gothic angle has not been explored as one of Chopin's probable literary inspirations. The main reason for such an omission is that until the 1970s most critics and commentators considered Gothic literature a sideshow of Romanticism at best or an embarrassing and destructive cultural phenomenon at worst. When the Gothic was not vilified, it was either politely ignored or offhandedly dismissed as a poor relation to the Romantic movement. However, early Gothic writers in England eagerly absorbed and expanded the themes and the moods of their forerunners. English readers met new Gothic fiction with delight and a growing demand for more. After Walpole's The Castle of Otranto, the throng of authors included Clara Reeve, Ann Radcliffe, Matthew Gregory Lewis, and Charles Maturin, along with many others.

Chapter5 considers woman’s collusion with the Devil in five major novels of the Gothic genre, from the years 1772 to 1820, along with three vampire tales written between 1836 and 1897 and a werewolf novella from 1928. The latter takes the by now firmly established Gothic notion of Satan as the emancipator of woman—previously mostly depicted by Gothic authors as a terrible thing, though at times with some ambivalence—and combines it with a feminist sensibility. Gothic texts, it is argued, were party to the gradual shift in the view of rebellious, demonic females, which made them more and more attractive as positive role models. In the early Gothic novels, ritual magic and the invocation of demons (typically with women as the invocator) is a recurring theme. They are thus also examples of how esotericism was very much a part of popular culture, and intertwined with “Satanic feminism”.

In chapter 2 historical Romanticism is outlined as it emerged and thrived in Germany, Britain, and France around 1800 and as it reached deep into the nineteenth century. The works and lives of Rousseau, Novalis, Morris, and others are discussed for this purpose. Moreover, he social and political side of Romanticism (Ruskin, Morris, and Marx) and romantic Gothic are discussed. Historical Romanticism is then linked to romanticism more broadly defined. The author argues that in many ways romanticism still persists today and that there is a line to be drawn start from Rousseau in the late eighteenth century to twentieth century counterculture and beyond. Even in the early twenty-first century forms of subjectivity are very much shaped by Romanticism - mainly in the form of our heritage from 1960s and 1970s romantic counterculture.

The point of departure of John Drakakis’ investigation of notions of death and decay is Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Drakakis takes the use of a real skull in Gregory Doran’s RSC production of the play (2008) as the starting-point for a discussion of the implications of rereading the Renaissance through the history of the Gothic in terms of the current obsession with notions of death, material and virtual reality. Drawing on a wide variety of Renaissance writers including Donne, Webster and Middleton as well as on Gothic novelists such as Horace Walpole, Ann Radcliffe and Isabella Kelly, he discusses possible connections and their legitimacy in connection to theoretical approaches from Freud to Bataille and Derrida.