The Histories of the Gothic series consists of four volumes:Gothic Literature 1764—1824,Gothic Literature 1825—1914,Twentieth Century GothicandAmerican Gothic. The series provides a comprehensive introduction to the history of Gothic Literature and to a variety of critical and theoretical approaches. Volumes in the series also raise questions about how the Gothic canon has been received and seek to critically challenge, rather than simply reaffirm, commonplace perceptions of the Gothic tradition. Whilst intended as an introduction to the history of the Gothic, they thus also provide a rigorous analysis of how that history has been developed...

To understand American literature, and indeed America, one must understand the Gothic, which is, simply, the imaginative expression of the fears and forbidden desires of Americans. The Gothic has given voice to suppressed groups, and has provided an approach to taboo subjects such as miscegenation, incest and disease. The study of the Gothic offers a forum for discussing some of the key issues of American society, including gender and the nation’s continuing drama of race.

From the beginning, and to the present, some of the best and most revealing of our literary works have been Gothic, and many of America’s...

In the decades between the American Revolution and the Civil War, the nation grew from a narrow strip of land along a largely unexplored landmass to a continental power. Nature was tamed, the frontier pushed far to the west. These accomplishments, celebrated by most Americans still, led to an optimistic belief in progress: the lives of Americans inevitably improved because of democratic values, righteousness, education, technology and the free markets of an expanding nation. American Gothic presented a counter-narrative, undercutting the celebration of progress, inquiring about its costs and the omissions from the story. Gothic writers persisted in asking troubling...

The tragedy of the American Civil War was followed by a period of great change, stress and paradox. The most characteristic and successful writings of this period were in the modes of realism (and its successor, naturalism) and the Gothic. Realism and the Gothic seem opposed, contradictory, but they responded to the same issues, and often were created by the same authors. The Gothic of this time was realism’s shadow or dark twin. In a period of national growth and faith in progress, the Gothic continued to confront the nightmares in the shadows of American life, and continued its role...

Modernism, the dominant aesthetic of the middle twentieth century, began as an avant-garde movement in the years before the First World War. It produced its major defining works in the 1920s, and had hardened into orthodoxy by the 1950s.

These were turbulent decades for the United States, which escaped the worst devastation of the ‘Great War’ and entered a period of exuberance and prosperity (though unevenly distributed), before the bleak disillusionment of the Great Depression. The cataclysm of the Second World War changed the United States profoundly. By the 1950s the nation was the most prosperous and powerful country in...

Gothic literature continues to provide an alternative reading of American culture in the volatile decades from the 1960s to the present. As new voices from minority groups have emerged, they have often expressed themselves though the Gothic, while changing and enriching the Gothic tradition. Gothic writers still explore the American past, its wilderness legacy, the anxieties of its cities and its emerging suburban culture, and push their speculations into the imagined, often terrifying, future.

As political realities shifted near the end of the twentieth century, and the dominance of the United States began to erode, so too did the powerful...

American author Joan Didion once observed that ‘we tell ourselves stories in order to live’.¹ Americans often have told themselves Gothic stories. If the dominant American narrative has been of success, progress, innovation and opportunity, Gothic has provided a counter-narrative in which skepticism, bitterness and nightmare are acknowledged. It is remarkable how soon this counter-narrative appears. In Crèvecoeur’sLetters from an American Farmer, we see both emerge virtually simultaneously. At present, when the confidence America felt after the Second World War has faded, and its future role is uncertain, Gothic seems to have become the dominant mode of American imagination....