Gothic Originals – serie

Countess Appollonia Zulmer – beautiful, rich, and popular – can have any man she wants, at least until she meets Count Wiemar. Interested only in submissive, uneducated and unworldly women, Wiemar rejects Appollonia in favour of Julia, a simple woman whose primary joy in life is to obey her husband’s will. Despondent and then furious, Appollonia vows revenge, becoming Julia’s intimate confidante, opening her eyes to the limitations of patriarchy, and convincing her that her growing feelings for Count Darlowitz, Wiemar’s best friend, are no crime.An epistolary novel about the destructive power of emotion, The Passions offers new insights into early feminism, romantic understandings of emotion and the sublime, and early nineteenth-century religious debates. It is an engrossing, powerful work of nineteenth-century literature, featuring one of the most memorable female villains of all time. Available to modern audiences for the first time, The Passions will engross literary scholars and casual readers alike.

In The Foresters, Elizabeth Gunning offers an entertaining romp through the many tropes of Gothic literature, including clandestine marriages; tyrannous fathers; encounters with banditti; mysterious crypts; strange ceremonies conducted at midnight; sublime scenery; a spectre (or two); and inexplicable disembodied voices – to name but a few. Gunning employs all of these devices to create a compelling story combining the wildest elements of fiction with her own personal history and experience within eighteenth-century society, producing both a social document and an entertaining read. Considering multiple complex themes, this novel is not only an entertaining Gothic novel, but also presents some of the most pressing concerns of the day for consideration by the reader. Presented in print for the first time since 1796, the novel is accompanied here by a comprehensive introduction to the text and detailed scholarly notes.

Almost fifty years before Bram Stoker penned Dracula, Dion Boucicault staged The Vampire, a three-act play that thrilled London audiences as well as Queen Victoria. The production boasted innovations of stagecraft and dramatic composition, to say nothing of the mesmerising performance of Boucicault as the titular creature. After The Vampire closed, Boucicault moved to the United States and revised his play, staging a two-act version renamed The Phantom in 1856. The Vampire has languished in relative obscurity, with no published edition nor critical commentary, since the mid-nineteenth century years. Boucicault’s original handwritten script provides the basis for this first full edition of his innovative tour de force. Similarly, a manuscript of The Phantom, updated by Boucicault for an 1873 production, offers audiences a new version of this influential play. The Vampire and The Phantom can now take their proper place in the lineage of vampire literature that began with Polidori and continues to this day.

This book exposes how turn-of-the-twentieth-century Hispanic authors broke from European and American Gothic models to contend with their own anxieties over modernity and rising first-wave feminisms. The result was a trend of sympathetic female vampires, predating comparable Anglo and European representations by several decades. In its analysis of the female vampire in Hispanic literature, the critical introduction also traces the Gothic’s origins and developments in Latin America and Spain, presenting a working theory of Gothic traditions in the form of a transhispanic literary phenomenon. The tales compiled in the collection include Leopoldo Lugones’s ‘The Female Vampire’ (1899), Clemente Palma’s ‘The White Farmhouse’ (1904), Antonio de Hoyos y Vinent’s ‘Mr. Cadaver and Miss Vampire’ (1910), Carmen de Burgos’s The Cold Woman (1922), and Horacio Quiroga’s ‘The Vampire’ (1927). Only two of these tales have been previously been translated into English, and each appears here for the first time with scholarly annotations and accompanying analysis.

Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s The Factory Girl (1863) was a cheap serial intended for working-class readers. The sprawling plot centres on Laura Leslie and her daughter, Dora, who are the targets of a diverse cast of villains. After Laura’s tragic death, Dora and her adoptive mother start a new life working in a cotton mill, but Dora’s beauty attracts unwelcome attention, putting them in danger. Dora is the classic factory girl, a nineteenth-century revision of the Gothic heroine. Republished in the US in both newspapers and as a book, and translated into French, the novel has been out of print since the 1860s. This edition reproduces the original Halfpenny Journal text and illustrations, and adds a scholarly introduction placing the novel in numerous cultural contexts, including the rise of sensation fiction; nineteenth-century popular theatre; the transformation of the genre of the Gothic; and the backdrop of the Industrial Revolution.