ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book explores the ways in which British and Irish writers played a central role in portraying mainland Europe as a gothic landscape and a ghostly site, a place haunted in itself and also one that has actively haunted our imagination. Among the grander impact of politics and alliances, the British traveler and the tourist fostered a self-consciousness about “Europe” as a place, a distinct culture, a complex fabric of landscapes, histories, and identities. If the British were represented by tourists and travelers, by expatriates and migrants, in the English-language gothic tale, the Europeans themselves were students, magicians, monsters, seducers, and seductresses. Gothic locates perplexity in the porous boundary; its borderline states are precisely marked as such because they are prone to invasion, and the rational mind, the physical world, the nation all find themselves penetrated or plagued by forces from outside.
