Wright Angela, Townshend Dale. Romantic Gothic: An Edinburgh Companion

Edinburgh University Press, 2015. — 272 p.Romantic Gothic: An Edinburgh Companion provides a thorough critical, textual and historical account of the Gothic aesthetic as manifested across a wide range of Romantic-era literary texts, from the adumbrations of the Gothic mode in the proto-Romantic poetry of the 1740s, through to the 'belated' Gothic fictions of the late 1820s. Self-consciously breaching, like Hume and Gamer before it, the critical divide between what literary history has subsequently differentiated as the 'Gothic' and the 'Romantic', this collection of 17 newly commissioned chapters seeks to draw attention to what G. R. Thompson in 1947 termed 'dark Romanticism', that is, that prominent strain in late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century British, American and European literature in which the distinction between the popular, low-cultural reaches of the Gothic and the 'High' Romantic aesthetics of more canonical figures is all but erased.