Gothic Antiquity

Dale Townshend is Professor of Gothic Literature in the Manchester Centre for Gothic Studies, Manchester Metropolitan University. He has published widely on Gothic and Romantic writing of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, including most recently The Gothic World (with Glennis Byron; Routledge, 2014); Ann Radcliffe, Romanticism and the Gothic (with Angela Wright; Cambridge University Press, 2014); Romantic Gothic: An Edinburgh Companion (with Angela Wright; Edinburgh University Press, 2016); and Writing Britain's Ruins (with Michael Carter and Peter N. Lindfield; British Library, 2017). He was academic advisor on the 'Terror and Wonder: The Gothic Imagination' exhibition at the British Library (2014-2015). Between June 2015 and June 2017, he was the Principal Investigator on an AHRC Leadership Fellowship entitled Writing Britain's Ruins, 1700-1850: The Architectural Imagination, and in 2016, held a Fellowship at the Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University.

Townshend's book is a comprehensive, thoroughly researched, clearly written, quite convincing, and powerfully argued answer—at last—to the incompleteness and polarization in this array of scholarship... Gothic Antiquity, then, is a masterpiece of its kind: densely packed because of its scholarly rigor but also a pleasure to read because of its lucid style and its well-crafted, logical organization... All future research on and teaching about the Gothic's heyday in England, the rise of Romanticism, and the beginnings of the Victorian era, in writing and architecture, will need to take account of this monumental achievement in aesthetic, literary, and historical scholarship.

• Preface Introduction: Gothic Antiquity, Gothic Architecture, Gothic Romance 1: Associationist Aesthetics and the Foundations of the Architectural Imagination 2: Horace Walpole's Enchanted Castles 3: From 'Castles in the Air' to the Topographical Gothic: Locating Ann Radcliffe's Architectural Imagination 4: Improvement, Repair, and the Uses of the Gothic Past: Architecture, Chivalry, and Romance 5: Venerable Ruin' or 'Nurseries of Superstition': Ecclesiastical Architecture and the Gothic Literary Aesthetic 6: Antiquarian Gothic Romance: Castles, Ruins, and Visions of Gothic Antiquity Conclusion: From the Gothic to the Medieval: Historiography, Romanticism, and the Trajectories of the Architectural Imagination