Top 10 Books About Gothic Literature

1. Approaches to Teaching Gothic Fiction

by Diane Long Hoeveler (Editor). Modern Language Association of America. "Approaches to Teaching Gothic Fiction" offers reviews for books to use for your course, along with 28 essays, which cover background information and critical resources.

2. The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction

Jerrold E. Hogle (Editor). Cambridge University Press. From the publisher: "Essays explore the connections of Gothic fictions to political and industrial revolutions, the realistic novel, the theater, Romantic and post-Romantic poetry, nationalism and racism from Europe to America, colonized and post-colonial populations, the rise of film, the struggles between 'high' and 'popular' culture, and changing attitudes towards human identity, life and death, sanity and madness."

3. Handbook to Gothic Literature

by Marie Mulvey-Roberts. New York University Press. From the publisher: "Through a wide and eclectic range of brief essays written by leading scholars, The Handbook to Gothic Literature provides a virtual encyclopedia of things Gothic. From the Demonic to the Uncanny, the Bronte sisters to Melville, this volume plots the characteristics of Gothic's vastly different schools and manifestations, offering a comprehensive guide to Gothic writing and culture."

4. The Gothic

by Fred Botting. Boydell & Brewer, Limited. From the publisher: "Like all of the NCI series, this title is an introduction designed not only to define modern terms of lit crit but also to stimulate discussion and encourage a deeper knowledge of the subject. Traces the history of the Gothic and cultural significance of the form, from its beginnings in the 18th cent. to modern times."

5. Victorian Hauntings: Spectrality, Gothic, the Uncanny and Literature

by Julian Wolfreys. Palgrave Macmillan. From the publisher: "Victorian Hauntings asks its reader to consider the following questions: What does it mean to read or write with ghosts, or to suggest that acts of reading or writing are haunted? In what ways can authors in the nineteenth century be read so as to acknowledge the various phantom effects which return within their texts?"

6. Gothic Documents

by Robert Miles. Palgrave Macmillan. From the publisher: "In the 1790s, while across the Channel a political revolution raged, Britain was struck by a reading revolution, a taste for terror fiction that seemed to know no bounds. Ann Radcliffe and 'Monk' Lewis were only the most celebrated of a host of writers purveying a new brand of 'Gothic' literature."

7. Art of Darkness

by Anne Williams. University of Chicago Press. From the publisher: "Williams identifies distinct Male and Female Gothic traditions: In the Male plot, the protagonist faces a cruel, violent, and supernatural world, without hope of salvation. The Female plot, by contrast, asserts the power of the mind to comprehend a world which, though mysterious, is ultimately sensible."

8. Murder Most Foul: The Killer and the American Gothic Imagination

by Karen Halttunen. Harvard University Press. From the publisher: "In 'Murder Most Foul,' Karen Halttunen explores the changing view of murder from early New England sermons read at the public execution of murderers, through the 19th century, when secular and sensational accounts replaced the religious treatment of the crime as the manifestation of sinful human nature, to today's fascination with socio-psychological anatomies of murder."

9. Contested Castle: Gothic Novels and the Subversion of Domestic Ideology

by Kate Ferguson Ellis. University of Illinois Press. From the publisher: "Looking at novels from Horace Walpole's Castle of Otranto to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Kate Ferguson Ellis investigates the relationship between these two phenomena of middle-class culture - the idealization of the home and the popularity of the Gothic - and explores how both male and female authors used the Gothic novel to challenge the false claim of home as a safe, protected place."

10. American Gothic: New Interventions In A National Narrative

by Robert K. Martin. University of Iowa Press. From the publisher: "In America as in Britain, the rise of the Gothic represented the other - the fearful shadows cast upon Enlightenment philosophies of common sense, democratic positivism, and optimistic futurity. Many critics have recognized the centrality of these shadows to American culture and self-identification."