Literature, the Gothic and the Reconstruction of History

Daniel Renshaw is Lecturer in Modern History in the Department of History at the University of Reading, UK. His research focuses on migration, diaspora, prejudice and identity in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.Neil Cocks is Associate Professor in the Department of English Literature at the University of Reading, UK. He has published widely on subjects as diverse as Victorian literature, children’s literature, Ayn Rand, critical university studies, film theory and the Gothic.

• Introduction - Neil Cocks and Daniel Renshaw; Part I. The Prehuman and Prehistoric; 1. Gothic Nightmares of Prehistory: How the Victorian Imagination Gave Birth to Dinosaurs as We Know Them; 2. Natural History vs. Human History: The Scary Return of the Past in Fortitude; Part II. The Medieval and the Early Modern; 3. “’Tis a fearful height!”: Temporal and Physical Vertigo in Eighteenth-Century Gothic Plays; 4. “Embodied, to the eye of Fear”: Affective Encounters and Antiquarian Mediation in Anne Bannerman’s Tales of Superstition and Chivalry; 5. An Inheritance of Witches: William Harrison Ainsworth’s Uses of the Medieval in The Lancashire Witches; 6. Winterson’s Witches: A Reappraisal and Reclamation of the Abject; Part III. The Long Nineteenth Century; 7. Human Remains and/in Gothic Nightmares: Revisiting the Past?; 8. “The Pretence of Civilisation”: Gothic Progress in G. W. M. Reynolds’s The Mysteries of London; 9. The Gothic Nature of Archives and the Work of M.R James and Henry James; 10. Transnational Gothic Histories and the Migrant Experience in Britain; Part IV. The Modern; 11. The Haunting of the Past in Contemporary Italian Gothic Fiction; 12. History, Haunting through the Layers in Contemporary Staged Ghost Stories; 13. “The Historical Text as Literary Artifact”, or Reading History as Gothic: Identity, Event, Time; Index