History of the Gothic: Gothic Literature 1825-1914 (review)

Jarlath Killeen's Gothic Literature 1825-1914 forms the second volume of the History of the Gothic series published by the University of Wales Press—it follows Carol Margaret Davison's History of the Gothic: Gothic Literature 1764-1824 (2009) and sets the stage for Charles Crow's History of the Gothic: American Gothic (2009) and Lucie Armitt's History of the Gothic:Twentieth-Century Gothic (2011). Killeen's aim is to follow "the traces of a tradition" through the Victorian period by "delineating the means by which the Gothic travelled into and transformed other genres and narratives" (3). In doing so, it necessarily adopts a "very flexible and inclusive understanding of the Gothic," including within that category both texts without an explicitly historical setting and those which might elsewhere be dismissed as merely "non-Gothic experimentation with Gothic conventions" (2). The result is an overview of the nineteenth century as a period in which the gothic cross-fertilised and mutated to produce some of the genre's most interesting manifestations.

Picking apart and problematising the relationships between literary genres in the nineteenth century is at the heart of Killeen's project. In successive chapters, he challenges the traditional critical divisions between realism and the gothic, between the historical novel and the gothic novel, and between the ghost story and the historical romance. Using this approach, the study convincingly reads texts by such unlikely figures as Thomas Hardy, J. M. Barrie, and H. Rider Haggard as situated beneath the broad umbrella of Victorian gothic.

Canonical Victorian writers constitute the main interest of Killeen's study. By its own admission, the short (186-page) text is a survey. It therefore passes over many lesser-known gothic novels, such as Sabine Baring-Gould's Mehalah (1880). Instead, its principal focus is on unveiling the gothic elements in familiar nineteenth-century texts such as Bleak House (1852-53), Great Expectations (1860-61), Jane Eyre (1847), and The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891). This makes the text eminently useful to undergraduate students, and it should become a staple of undergraduate reading lists.

One notable exception to the book's main focus on well-known authors is its fascinating section on gothic elements in the Tudor novels of William Harrison Ainsworth, an author who has recently seen an increase in critical attention as a result of growing interest in the phenomenon of Tudorism. Other ways in which Killeen's text keys into recent critical debate include its focus on the relationship between regionalism and the gothic and its study of the pervasiveness of haunting and the occult in Victorian culture.

Killeen's self-consciousness about his own place within literary-critical traditions (the book begins by historicizing twentieth-century study of the gothic) is another aspect of this book that makes it an ideal undergraduate text. With Killeen, one feels that students are in a safe pair of hands. The space allotted to plot summary might seem somewhat tedious to more advanced researchers (particularly in the case of well-known works), but this does serve to make the text accessible and unintimidating. And the study's survey of criticism and its bibliography of critical texts also make it an ideal teaching tool, although a bibliography of primary texts would also have been very useful for encouraging further reading and independent research.

Among the book's appendices is a "Gothic Chronology" which effectively places in a broader historical context the gothic texts discussed within the study. The Victorian gothic is also related to a range of salient nineteenth-century concerns and developments throughout the main chapters: the Victorian crisis in faith, Darwinism, Irish nationalism, urbanisation, child labour, and so on. The study could have been enriched by more time spent situating nineteenth-century gothic literature within the broader Victorian traditions of the gothic. Nineteenth-century rhetoric about gothic freedoms, debates surrounding England's so-called gothic constitution, and the restoration...