Gothic Print Culture, 1789-1900

Gothic Print Culture, 1789-1900 sets innovations in print culture alongside the development of the Gothic aesthetic. The rarely reprinted novels, chapbooks, magazine fictions, and plays these volumes collect suggest that the markers of the early Gothic—the fragmented texts and the lost or pseudonymous authors—are best understood within a history of mediation. Beginning in 1789, the year Ann Radcliffe’s first novel was published, these four volumes track the Gothic through its heyday in the 1790s and chart its persistence through the end of the century. In rapidly reprinting and adapting texts and disseminating them in a range of formats, print culture obscured textual origins and challenged the parameters of authorial identity, echoing in uncanny ways the conventions of the Gothic itself.