The Fantastic and European Gothic

Of all the current debates in the burgeoning field of Gothic Studies, perhaps the most urgent concerns the nature and significance of the continental tradition of the conte fantastique. Not only does Matthew Gibson's ground-breaking study provide the first coherent assessment of post-Napoleonic European Gothic, it also explores the impact that this politically and philosophically subversive continental tradition had on British writers as divergent as Sheridan Le Fanu and Robert Louis Stevenson. Linking as it does post-Revolutionary French history with the rise of French and German Romanticism and, ultimately, the Victorian Gothic, this book challenges many of our own assumptions about nineteenth-century generic conventions. Dr Terry Hale, University of Hull