This Reader's Guide focuses upon Gothic fiction produced predominantly in the Romantic era (1780-1820). Angela Wright assembles some of the most important critical writings about Romantic Gothic literature since its inception to the present day. The Guide begins by charting the moral and political panic provoked by Gothic's increasing popularity in the 1790s, and then examines the genre's recuperation as a serious area of literary study through aesthetic, political, psychoanalytic and gender criticism.

ANGELA WRIGHT is Lecturer in Romantic Literature at the University of Sheffield.