Gothic Print Culture, 1789-1900 : Volume I: Novels

The first volume of Gothic Print Culture, 1789-1900 reprints excerpts from rare Gothic novels to chart the relationship between Gothic aesthetics and the shifting economic, technological and legal affordances of print in the long nineteenth century. Highlighting the anonymous and pseudonymous authors, commercial presses and circulating libraries—such as the Minerva Press—that shaped the early Gothic more than any one author, the first half of the volume makes possible a revaluation of the collective voice of early Gothic fiction. The second half considers the increasingly sophisticated mediation and dissemination of Gothic novels. Victorian Gothics, such as James Malcom Rymer’s penny blood The Apparition and William Harrison Ainsworth’s Windsor Castle, were published both serially and in volume form. The movement between serial publication and volume formats provides a new context for study of the Gothic novel’s reliance on inset tales and cliffhangers, which can be understood as an effect of their publication within magazines and newspapers. Finally, the transatlantic publication circuits of May Agnes Gordon’s Midnight Queen and Julien Gordon’s Vampires shed new light on the Gothic and the development of international copyright law.