GOTHIC READING

One of the most commonly asked questions is what are the best books about Gothic Literature. Below are listed just a few, but the best and most fundamental are unfortunately out of print and include Devendra Varma's The Gothic Flame, Montague Summers' The Gothic Quest and Edith Birkhead's Tales of Terror.

 The Literature of Terror, Volume One - The Gothic Tradition

  Gothic Horror : A Reader's Guide from Poe to King and Beyond

  Gothic America

Gothic Readings : The First Wave, 1764-1840

  The Return of the Repressed : Gothic Horror from the Castle of Otranto to Alien

  Gothic : Four Hundred Years of Excess, Horror, Evil and Ruin

Gothic (The New Critical Idiom)

Modern Gothic : A Reader

Gothic Documents : A Sourcebook 1700-1820

Art of Darkness : A Poetics of Gothic

The Oxford Book of Gothic Tales

The Castle of Otranto, Vathek, the Vampyre

The Monk : A Romance (Penguin Classics)- Mathew Lewis

The Mysteries of Udolpho (Oxford World's Classic)- Ann Radcliffe

The Italian, or the Confessional of the Black Penitents - Ann Radcliffe

Northanger Abbey (Penguin Classics)- Jane Austen

Dracula (Penguin Classics)- Bram Stoker

Melmoth the Wanderer (Penguin Classics) - Charles Maturin

Frankenstein: the original 1818 text - Mary Shelley

Uncle Silas - Le Fanu

Information on Gothic chapbooks, bluebooks and many trade authors is still vary sparse and critically bias. Below is a list of suggested readings for greater contextualisation of the form:

• Anglo, Michael, Penny Dreadfuls and Other Victorian Horrors (London: Jupiter Books Limited, 1977).

• Dudek, Louis, Literature and the Press: A History of Printing, Printed Media, and Their relation to Literature (Toronto: The Ryerson Press and Contact Press, 1960).

• Frank, Frederick S. The First Gothics: A Critical Guide to the English Gothic Novel (London: Garland Publishing, Inc.,1987).

• -------, 'Gothic Gold: The Sadleir-Black Gothic Collection' Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, Vol. 26, pp. 287-313.

• Haining, Peter, ed., Great Tales of Terror From Europe and America: Gothic Stories of Horror & Romance, 1765-1840. Volume Two. (London: Victor Gollancz, Ltd., 1972).

• ------, Tales from Gothic Bluebooks (Chislehurst: The Gothic Society, 1978).

• Mayo, Robert D, The English Novel in the Magazines 1740-1815 (London: Oxford University Press, 1962).

• ------, 'Gothic Romance in the Magazines', Publications of the Modern Language Association, LXV (1950), pp. 762-789.

• -------, 'How Long was the Gothic in Vogue', Modern Language Notes, LVIII (1943), pp. 58-64.

• -------,'The Gothic Short Story in the Magazine', Modern Language Review, XXXVII (1942), pp. 448-454.

• Pitcher, E. W., 'Changes in Short Fiction in Britain 1785-1810: Philosophic Tales, Gothic Tales, and Fragments and Visions', Studies in Short Fiction, 13:3 (1976: Summer), pp. 331-354.

• Potter, Franz, The History of Gothic Publishing, 1800-1835 (London: Palgrave, 2005).

• -------,Writing for the Spectre of Poverty: Exhuming Sarah Wilkinson's Bluebooks and Novels, Cardiff Corvey Website Reading the Romantic Text: Issue 6 December 2003.

• Shepard, Leslie, The History of Street Literature (Newton Abbot: David & Charles, 1973).

• Summers, Montague, A Gothic Bibliography (New York: Russell & Russell, 1964).

• -------, A Gothic Quest: A History of the Gothic Novel (London: Fortune Press, 1938; Rpt. New York: Russell & Russell, 1968).

• Varma Devendra, The Evergreen Tree of Diabolical Knowledge (Washington DC: Consortium Press, 1972).

• -------, The Gothic Flame (New York: Russell & Russell, 1966; Rpt. London: A. Barker, 1957)