Comic Gothic

Avril Horner is Emeritus Professor of English Literature at Kingston University. With Sue Zlosnik she has co-authored many articles and several books, including Daphne du Maurier: Writing, Identity and the Gothic Imagination (1998), Gothic and the Comic Turn (2005) and Women and the Gothic (2016). Other works include Living on Paper: Letters from Iris Murdoch, 1934-1995 (with Anne Rowe, 2015) and Barbara Comyns: A Savage Innocence (2024). Alone, she has published essays on writers such as Djuna Barnes, Kate Chopin, Iris Murdoch and Carol Ann Duffy. Her biography of Barbara Comyns will be published in 2024. Sue Zlosnik is Emeritus Professor of English at Manchester Metropolitan University and former co-President of the International Gothic Association. With Avril Horner, she has published six books, including Daphne du Maurier: Writing, Identity and the Gothic Imagination (1998), Gothic and the Comic Turn (2005), The Edinburgh Companion to Women and the Gothic (2016) as well as numerous essays and articles. Alone, she has published essays on writers as diverse as J. R. R. Tolkien and Chuck Palahniuk and a monograph, Patrick McGrath (2011). She is co-editor (with Agnes Andeweg) of Gothic Kinship (2013).

The Gothic has to do with the dark, but ever since the days of Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey it has also had its comic side, revelling in exaggeration, melodrama, pastiche, satire and the absurd, as this brilliant collection of essays demonstrates across a satisfyingly wide range of periods and styles.

• IntroductionPart One: From 1740 to the Mid Nineteenth CenturyPart Two: From the 1890s to the Twenty-first CenturyPart Three: Comic Gothic and the New Millennium