Popular Revenants: The German Gothic and Its International Reception, 1800-2000

The literary mode of the Gothic is well established in English Studies, and there is growing interest in its internationality. Gothic fiction is seen as transgressive, especially in the way it crosses borders, often illicitly – for instance, in the form of plagiarized texts or pseudo-translations of nonexistent sources. In the 1790s, when the English Gothic novel was emerging, the real or ostensible source of many of these uncanny texts was Germany. Thisfirst book in English dedicated to the German Gothic in over thirty years is aimed at students and researchers in German Studies and English Studies, and redresses deficiencies in existing sources, which are outdated, piecemeal, or not sufficiently grounded in German Studies.
The book examines the international reception of German Gothic since the 1790s heyday of the Gothic novel in Britain and Germany; traces a line of Gothic writing in German to thepresent day; and inquires into the extraliterary impact of German Gothic. Thus the essays do full justice to the Gothic as a site of conflict and exchange – both between cultures and between discourses.

Contributors:Peter Arnds, Silke Arnold-de Simine, Jurgen Barkhoff, Matthias Bickenbach, Andrew Cusack, Mario Grizelj, Joerg Kreienbrock, Barry Murnane, Victor Sage, Monika Schmitz-Emans, Catherine Smale, Andrew Webber

Andrew Cusack is Alexander von Humboldt Research Fellow at the Institut fur Kulturwissenschaft of the Humboldt-Universitat Berlin. Barry Murnane is Assistant Professor of German and Comparative Literature at the Martin-Luther-Universitat Halle-Wittenberg, Germany.