The Gothic Book

This is a sound and comprehensive overview of the Gothic genre. It seems to be intended primarily for undergraduate students, whereas I read it as a general, non-academic reader with a strong interest in the subject. Perhaps for this reason, I initially thought the style rather heavy-going. Once I settled in and got used to it, I found much to enjoy and learn in this book.

Botting starts his story with the Graveyard Poets of the early 18th Century who, with their images of death and night, were the precursors of the Gothic authors who would emerge later in the century. In the subsequent chapters, all the usual suspects are covered - Horace Walpole, Ann Radcliffe, Matthew "Monk" Lewis, William Beckford. However, space is given to relatively lesser-known purveyors of the Gothic including Regina Maria Roche and Sophia Lee.

Some books about the subject restrict themselves to the "English Gothic". However, Botting provides a chapter on the transformation of the Gothic by American authors such as Charles Brockden Brown, Hawthorne, Poe and Melville. The book is also very good at explaining how, later in the 19th Century and in the first decades of the 20th, the Gothic was "diffused" into a number of other literary genres, including the sensation and crime novels. What was a new perspective for me was also the Gothic's influence and/or presence in modernist works by T.S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf.

The 20th Century brought with it the rise of cinema and other media were Gothic sensibilities can manifest themselves beyond literature. This development is also addressed in the final chapters although, possibly because of the very vastness of the subject, the closing sections have a rather "rushed" feel to them. As a general introduction to the Gothic, however, this is hard to fault.