Fantastic and European Gothic

Dr Matthew Gibson is associate professor of English literature at the University of Macau, China.

• Introduction 1) Fantasy and Counter-Revolution in the Theory and Fiction of Charles Nodier. 2) History and Politics in the Fantastic Fiction of Hoffmann, and his Reception in France. 3) The Double Life of the Artist in the Recits fantastiques of Theophile Gautier, and the Rejection of Bourgeois Life under the July Monarchy. 4) 'A Life in Death a Death in Life': the Legitimist Novels of Paul Feval and the Catastrophe of the Second Empire. 5) Paul Feval's Le Chevalier Tenebre and Le Fanu's 'The Room in the Dragon Volant': the Failures of the Bourbon Restoration. 6) Robert Louis Stevenson's 'Olalla', The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and the Refutation of Utilitarian Morality. Conclusion.

Of all the current debates in the burgeoning field of Gothic Studies, perhaps the most urgent concerns the nature and significance of the continental tradition of the conte fantastique. Not only does Matthew Gibson's ground-breaking study provide the first coherent assessment of post-Napoleonic European Gothic, it also explores the impact that this politically and philosophically subversive continental tradition had on British writers as divergent as Sheridan Le Fanu and Robert Louis Stevenson. Linking as it does post-Revolutionary French history with the rise of French and German Romanticism and, ultimately, the Victorian Gothic, this book challenges many of our own assumptions about nineteenth-century generic conventions. Dr Terry Hale, University of Hull