One professor wrote his dissertation on the Gothic. Our leader is an English professor who asks great questions that provide a lot of discussion. We began reading this in the spring semester, but we postponed many sessions, resulting in a continuation into the fall semester.This Gothic short story collection gave us a feel for the development of the genre. Our university professor book club usually chooses short story collections we can read together so members who miss a discussion don't feel "behind" when the next meeting rolls around.
In a lively, authoritative introduction David Blair provides fresh insights and a detailed commentary on the stories’ place in the complex traditions of Gothic writing in British and American literature. Together they cover the spectrum of Gothic story-telling – tales of madness and violence, of shape-shifters and spectres, that express some of the deepest fears of the human mind – insanity, sexuality, death and the often terrible power of the past to catch up with the present. Some of these stories, like the haunting ‘The Lame Priest’ are ‘lost masterpieces’ and several have never been anthologised before.
James appears alongside that of anonymous writers from the start of the period and many lesser-known authors from Britain and America. Work by writers such as Poe, Dickens, Hawthorne, Gaskell and M. This superb new collection brings together stories from the earliest decades of Gothic writing with later 19th and early 20th century tales from the period in which Gothic diversified into the familiar forms of the ghost- and-horror-story. Late in the eighteenth century authors began to write ‘Gothic’ stories as a way of putting literature back in touch with the irrational, the supernatural and the bizarre, which had been neglected in the ‘Age of Reason’. Selected and Edited with an Introduction and Notes by David Blair, University of Kent at Canterbury.
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