The Italian The Midnight Assassin Or Confession Of The Monk Rinaldi Containing A Complete History Of His Dreadful Crimes And The Unparalleled Sufferings Of Amanda Lusigni Etc

By the early 1830s the old school of Gothic literature was exhausted. Late Romanticism, emphasising as it did the uncertainties of personality and imagination, gave it a new lease of life. Gothic—the literature of disturbance and uncertainty—now produced works that reflected domestic fears, sexual crimes, drug filled hallucinations, the terrible secrets of middle class marriage, imperial horror at alien invasion, occult demonism and the insanity of psychopaths. It was from the 1830s onwards that the old gothic castle gave way to the country house drawing room, the dungeon was displaced by the sewers of the city and the villains of early novels became the familiar figures of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Dracula, Dorian Grey and Jack the Ripper. After the death of Prince Albert (1861), the Gothic became darker, more morbid, obsessed with demonic lovers, blood sucking ghouls, blood stained murderers and deranged doctors. Whilst the gothic architecture of the Houses of Parliament and the new Puginesque churches upheld a Victorian ideal of sobriety, Christianity and imperial destiny, Gothic literature filed these new spaces with a dread that spread like a plague to America, France, Germany and even Russia. From 1830 to 1914, the period covered by this volume, we saw the emergence of the greats of Gothic literature and the supernatural from Edgar Allan Poe to Emily Bronte, from Sheridan Le Fanu to Bram Stoker and Robert Louis Stevenson. Contributors also examine the fin-de-siècle dreamers of decadence such as Arthur Machen, M P Shiel and Vernon Lee and their obsession with the occult, folklore, spiritualism, revenants, ghostly apparitions and cosmic annihilation. This volume explores the period through the prism of architectural history, urban studies, feminism, 'hauntology' and much more. 'Horror', as Poe teaches us, 'is the soul of the plot'.

To better understand and contextualise the twilight of the Gothic genre during the 1920s and 1830s, The History of Gothic Publishing, 1800-1835: Exhuming the Trade examines the disreputable aspects of the Gothic trade from its horrid bluebooks to the desperate hack writers who created the short tales of terror. From the Gothic publishers to the circulating libraries, this study explores the conflict between the canon and the twilight, and between the disreputable and the moral.

This new collection of nine rare Gothic tales has been assembled to represent a wide range of adaptations, redactions, plagiarisms and condensations of Gothic motifs and characterisations in the 1820s and 1830s. From Mary Shelley's Frankenstein to Charles Maturin's Melmoth the Wanderer, The Monster Made By Man illustrates the evolution of the Gothic genre and revisits what is most horrifying- the familiar.

This exceedingly rare Gothic bluebook epitomizes the short tale of terror as the Gothic began to evolve and change its course. Frederick Frank in The First Gothics describes the bluebook as "Wild, crude, incredible, sensational, THE BLOODY HAND is an average sample of what the Gothic public bought and devoured in 1800."(pg. 32) The plot of the Bloody Hand encompasses the vast arsenal of Gothic motifs from the terrors of the Illuminati, a revengeful monk, monastic imprisonment to death by poison, to persecution of a one-handed monk. Set during the turbulent French Revolution, the chapbook chronicles the O'Mara family's adventures, who are bound to suffer for the sins of a grandfather who was cursed by a vindictive monk. The frantic narrative underscores the potential of the short tale of terror and reflects the readers' shifting interests from long Gothic novels to short shocking doses of horror.