INTRODUCTION

What is Gothic? There is no single, straightforward answer to this question. For many years, it was taken for granted that the Gothic novel flourished from the publication of Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto in 1764 to Charles Maturin’s Melmoth, The Wanderer in 1820. Gothic novels could be easily identified by their incorporation of dominant tropes such as imperilled heroines, dastardly villains, ineffectual heroes, supernatural events, dilapidated buildings and atmospheric weather. (A helpfully comprehensive list is provided in Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s The Coherence of Gothic Conventions, 1980.) Texts that appeared after this time were considered either as throwbacks to this earlier model (such as Bram Stoker’s Dracula, 1897) or simply as not being Gothic. As time went on, however, and criticism of the Gothic became more sophisticated, it became evident that not only was this model inadequate to describe texts produced after 1820, from James Hogg’s Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824) to contemporary TV series Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997-2003), but that there were highly significant Gothic novels, such as William Beckford’s Oriental tale Vathek (1786), which exceeded these generic presumptions.