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This chapter focuses on the subjects and styles of Gothic itself, interpreting Gothic in a way which establishes parameters for the analysis of the narrative and historiographical techniques of the Waverley Novels. It brings together Gothic's dual preoccupation with history and narrative, relating both to anxieties of literary origin by way of the figure of the recess. The frame narrative of The Monastery, which describes the search for the lost heart of the Abbot Ambrosius in the ruins of St Mary's at Kennaquhair, makes architecture the focus of a search which is really about ways of telling, or narrating. So, too, in Gothic, narrative and historical processes are repeatedly figured as tortuous approaches through hidden subterranean passageways to a secret which may finally be revealed, but which can never be an adequate recompense for the terrors of the quest. The interpretation of Gothic in the chapter is allusive rather than exhaustive, and it does not engage in the kind of comparative analysis which would allow it to claim that the techniques and preoccupations which it highlights in late 18th-century Gothic are exclusive to that form. It does, however, emphasize certain matters rather more than has been done in previous criticism, paying particularly close attention to devices of historical authentication in Gothic, to questions of literary and historical origin, and to the problems which arise when Gothic conventions intrude into non-Gothic works.

This chapter examines the influence of Charles Dickens and G. W. M. Reynolds on the changes in the Gothic fiction landscape in England during the mid-Victorian period. It suggests that the works of these two authors mapped out and located terrors and mysteries in criminalized districts in the heart of London. It argues that such works as Oliver Twist, The Mysteries of London, and Bleak House were adapted to serve new emphases and needs that were shaping the perception of London and its problems at this time.

This chapter examines the critical consensus concerning the use of psychology to explain Gothic fiction. Many critics believed that the application of psychology to Gothic fiction is inevitable because fantasy in literature deals with unconscious material, so that it seems rather absurd to try to understand its significance without some reference to psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic readings of texts. Another reason for the application of psychoanalysis to the Gothic rests on the perceived parity between aspects of this literary mode and the characteristics of psychopathology as identified by analysts.

This introductory chapter sets out the focus of the book, namely the relationship between Walter Scott's texts and the narrative strategies and conventions of late 18th- and early 19th-century Gothic, in order to elucidate the narrative complexities of the Waverley Novels, their interplays of different forms of narratorial and historical authority, and the special narratorial status of the ‘Author of Waverley’. It addresses, therefore, three issues: the construction and reception of a ‘Walter Scott’ who can stand detachedly on the margins of Romantic studies, to be included or not as the critical agenda dictates; the problematic status of the historical and the means of historical enquiry and authentication; and the literary transgressiveness of the Waverley Novels, defined as the narratorial and descriptive processes by which they both suggest and continually redefine generic vocabularies. An overview of the subsequent chapters is also presented.

This chapter examines the properties that define Gothic fiction and demonstrates the importance of various geographical and institutional locations for this genre in England during the late 18th century and mid-Victorian period. It highlights the importance of anachronism in Gothic fiction and describes the historical and rhetorical attitudes which underpin this mode. It analyses early Gothic fiction including Ann Radcliffe's A Sicilian Romance and The Italian.

This chapter examines changes and diversification in Gothic fiction in England during the mid-Victorian period. It describes how a number of works enabled the Gothic legacy to be brought up to date and explains how the so-called Sensation vogue provided principal repository for Gothic themes in the middle decades of the 19th century. Some of the most notable works during this period include Nathaniel Hawthorne's The House of the Seven Gables, Margaret Jane Hooper's The House of Raby, and Charles Dickens's Little Dorrit.

This chapter examines the historical motivations and emphases of Gothic fiction in England during the later part of the 19th century. It shows how changes in the perception of the scope and nature of historical time encouraged the emergence of a new breed of Gothic fiction which betrayed a distinct biological and anthropological cast. The chapter explains how the works of Arthur Conan Doyle, Arthur Machen, and Bram Stoker provided new locations for the unwelcome past to survive into and threaten the civilized present.

This chapter offers an alternative to the psychological/ontological and ideological readings of the literature of Gothic fiction in England during the late Victorian period. It argues that though late-Victorian scientists and horror writers shared a number of preoccupations and modes of representation, they ultimately had different agendas. For while horror fiction had a generic obligation to evoke fear or suggest mystery and science attempted to contain fear and offer a rational explanation for all phenomena.

This chapter focuses on some elements in Scott's novels which remain defiantly conventional in terms of the fashionable literature of his day, and which have largely succeeded in de-selecting themselves from subsequent critical scrutiny as marginal, inferior, or uninspired. Critical dissatisfaction with these apparent lapses is not obtuse, but rather too sensitive to the narrator's implied system of values. Scott is able to use Gothic conventions as variously and experimentally as he does precisely because he always leaves it open to readers to dismiss them as inauthentic. This process is especially complex in works which, like The Antiquary and The Heart of Midlothian, contain sustained parodies of sensationalist fiction and use its conventions to signal ideologies their narrators want to expose as false. The chapter presents five sample case-studies of the ways in which Gothic complicates the social, political, and historical interpretations of individual works.

Doom was the most advanced three-dimensional computer game in the world when it was released in 1993. The opening sequence of the violent virtual adventure playground leaves no doubt as to its aim or content. The rules of the game are kill or be killed until there are no more monsters left and the hostile military-industrial-research complex can be escaped. Mainly zones of terror, horror and violent sensation, bewildering labyrinths stalked by homicidal mutants, the various stages of the game also conceal secrets. The development of computer games owes debts to horror cinema and incorporates some of its features and, even, some images, in game design. The settings, shocks, monsters and graphic violence of games provide grounds for condemnation. Phantasmagoria did simply present terrifying images and evoke shocking effects with greater immediacy than Gothic fiction in a spectacular technical improvement on written communication. Though particular formulas fade, the association between Gothic fictions and technical innovations has persisted for more than 200 years.

This chapter takes Ann Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) as a representative example of the ‘waking dreams’ constructed by gothic fictions. In so doing, it reconceptualizes some of the key features of gothic fiction: its unprecedented mixing of conventions designed to represent the actual world with those normally deployed to evoke the marvellous; its ability to evoke in readers a powerful sense of the reality of its unreal worlds; and the consequent power of these virtual-realities to rouse the emotions of those who enter them. The argument begins with an account of John Locke's use of the camera obscura and magic lantern to illustrate the distinction between sensation and imagination, reason and passion, the real and the virtual; and it draws on the sensational psychology of David Hume, in which the mind itself is ‘a kind of theatre, where several perceptions successively make their appearance’.

This chapter explores the convergences and divergences of fictional and medico-legal discourse in Gothic fiction in England during the late Victorian period by focusing on the figure of the vampire. It explains how the vampire played an important role in the definition of the category of the sadist, aided writers in their portrayal of sexuality, and helped science to explain moral monstrosity. It contends that Bram Stoker's Dracula provided the best example of Gothic fiction's departure from the aims and procedures of psychiatric discourse.

Gothic fiction is bound up with the function of the paternal figure, an effect of and an engagement with a crisis in its legitimacy and authority, with tremors in its orchestration of symbolic boundaries and distinctions, with disruptions to its heterogeneous maintenance of cultural values and mores, with challenges to the way it presides unseen over the structured circulation of social exchanges and meanings. More precisely, it can be defined as a transgression of the paternal metaphor. The return to simple domesticity, recommended in the Gothic romance since Ann Radcliffe, seems to banish the spectres of romantic fancy. With the exposure and expulsion of those fictional spectres comes a more sustained interrogation of the assumptions and illusions supporting familial and social relations. Sigmund Freud's account of the father does not end with his murder. The psychological and cultural consequences of the act are extensive.

This chapter explores the genre of gothic fiction that emerged in the eighteenth century. It was Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto (1764) that is said to have initiated the genre, which continues to flourish to this day—although in a more debased form. Walpole's intention with this work was to blend two kinds of romance, the ancient and the modern. The modern romance pertains to the evolving genre of the novel, which continually tried to embody reality in representing its characters. Walpole's Gothic mode incorporated two elements: the supernatural and the psychologically believable. The rest of the chapter explores the context in which the Gothic mode emerged, and the elements that formed and created it.