Shakespearean Gothic

Out now from the University of Chicago Press:

Shakespearean Gothic
Distributed for University of Wales Press
EDITED BY CHRISTY DESMET AND ANNE WILLIAMS

192 pages | 10 | 5 1/2 x 8 1/2 | © 2009
University of Wales Press - Gothic Literary Studies

As evidenced by the vampires, werewolves, and other frights overrunning the best-seller lists, the Gothic remains immensely popular. This collection of essays traces the roots of the Gothic to an unexpected source: eighteenth-century interpretations of Shakespeare. Through close attention to literary, cultural, and historical detail, the contributors demonstrate that even as Shakespeare was being established as the supreme British writer, he was also being cited as justification for early Gothic writers’ abandonment of literary decorum and their interest in the supernatural.


Acknowledgements

List of Illustrations

List of Contributors

Introduction

PART I: GOTHIC APPROPRIATIONS OF ‘SHAKESPEARE’

1 Reading Walpole Reading Shakespeare

Anne Williams

2 Ann Radcliffe, ‘The Shakespeare of Romance Writers’

Rictor Norton

3 The Curse of Shakespeare

Jeffrey Kahan


PART II: REWRITING SHAKESPEARE’S PLAYS AND CHARACTERS
4 Shakespearean Shadows’ Parodic Haunting of Thomas Love Peacock’s Nightmare Abbey and Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey

Marjean D. Purinton and Marliss C. Desens

5 Fatherly and Daughterly Pursuits: Mary Shelley’s Matilda and Shakespeare’s King Lear

Carolyn A. Weber

6 Into the Madman’s Dream: the Gothic Abduction of Romeo and Juliet

Yael Shapira

7 Gothic Cordelias: the Afterlife of King Lear and the Construction of Femininity

Diane Long Hoeveler


PART III: SHAKESPEARE AS A GOTHIC WRITER
8 ‘We are not safe’: History, Fear and the Gothic in Richard III

Jessica Walker

9 Remembering Ophelia: Ellen Terry and the Shakespearizing of Dracula

Christy Desmet

10 ‘Rites of Memory’: the Heart of Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet

Susan Allen Ford


Afterword: Shakespearean Gothic

Frederick Burwick


Bibliography

Index