Travel in Gothic literature serves as a lens through which to explore deep-seated cultural anxieties surrounding fear, unfamiliar territories, and environmental shifts. The book examines how journeys in these narratives reflect themes of surveillance and the perception of the foreign, revealing the transformative impact of travel on both characters and readers. It delves into the interplay between movement and the psychological landscapes shaped by societal concerns.
This book covers Gothic writing and film from Henry James to Sarah Waters. Among its primary themes are the role of the ghost in relation to childhood and cultural mourning, the relationship between Gothic Architecture and the 'landscapes' of dream and nightmare and the interface between Gothic and Horror modes of writing.
George Eliot's reception as a writer has been chequered from the start. Prejudice followed the reluctant revelation of her real identity as a woman, and she suffered from critical neglect at the start of the 20th century, before a post-war renaissance of interest finally established her as one of the most powerful and accomplished of British novelists. Views of Mary Ann Evans, the woman behind the pseudonym, have always been controversial: castigated during her own time for sexual impropriety with a married man, accused by male friends of being an overly intellectual man-woman, rejected by 20th-century feminists for the opinions expressed in her essay Silly Novels by Lady Novelists, she is a figure for our own times as much as for her own.