Gothic Evolutions: Poetry, Tales, Context, Theory ed. by Corinna Wagner (review)

Scholars of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century gothic literature have been increasingly attentive to the transformations and evolution of this literary mode. This recent scholarship reflects gothic writers’ own understanding of their cultural moment in relation to the many layers of the past that they have labored to exhume as authors, translators, or editors. As Nick Groom notes in his 2014 edition of Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto, “If the eighteenth century witnessed an increasingly wide application of the Gothic and its cognates in a bewildering array of different fields, they remain rooted in historical and archaeological researches, in political and constitutional theory, in an escalating medievalism, and in an aesthetic that mixed the sublime with melancholy, nostalgia with the repression of history, and mortality with the revival of the past” (Groom, xxxvii).

Corinna Wagner, Groom’s colleague at the University of Exeter, brilliantly addresses this multifaceted quality of gothic literature from the late eighteenth through the nineteenth century. As its subtitle indicates, this anthology combines literature and theory, text and context. In providing this combined focus, Gothic Evolutions is substantially different from the many collections of gothic literature that are currently available. Moreover, this collection is distinctive in its inclusion of a wide range of genres—poetry, drama, short stories, tales—from English, Irish, Scottish, French, Russian, Japanese, and American gothic writers. In four substantial appendices, Wagner presents critical, historical, scientific, aesthetic, and theoretical texts helpful for interpreting gothic literature, making this anthology ideal for teaching. It is an excellent contribution to the impressive catalog of scholarly editions of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century gothic novels that Broadview Press has assembled over the past two decades. Currently, there are twenty-one titles in Broadview’s “Gothic and Horror” list.

In Gothic Evolutions, Wagner challenges readers and especially teachers to devise various ways of reading the Gothic, to plot its evolution, and to discern its cultural transformations through the literary and theoretical materials that she assembles and contextualizes. She not only provides a detailed chronology to enable readers to chart this evolution, but she has also, for the most part, selected “the earliest edition of the texts . . . and ordered them by that initial date of publication.” Her rationale for this choice, even though such an editorial principle might result in a student’s encountering a less familiar version of a poem such as The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, is once again to document the evolution of gothic works, to “lend readers a sense of how texts relate to one another and how they respond to political events and cultural movements” (li). As demonstrated in her essay “The Dream of a Transparent Body: Identity, Science and the Gothic Novel” (Gothic Studies 14.1 [2012]: 74–92), Wagner’s primary intellectual concern is to identify the “deeply embedded historical continuities running through” gothic fiction as well as medical science (“Dream,” 89). And these continuities are precisely what she leads readers to explore in this anthology, by drawing our attention to the evolution of gothic culture through the literature, art, science, and theory of the nineteenth century.

Wagner provides a helpful roadmap in her admirably synthesizing introduction, in which she addresses the issues that she also presents as categories, specified in the “Thematic Guide,” for the literary works she has selected. These thematic categories—“Uses of the Past/Medievalism”; “Politics, Law, Religion, Economics, and Race”; “Medicine, Science, and the Body”; “Gender”; “Sexuality”; “Psychology and Emotion”—reflect contemporary scholarly interests in gothic studies, especially medical humanities, a field that Wagner has significantly influenced with the recent publication of Pathological Bodies: Medicine and Political Culture (2013). In that work she demonstrates, through a series of “case studies,” the “migration of medical into political discourse,” revealing “how frequently medicine, politics, and morality were discursively and thus ideologically yoked” (PB, 8, 13).

As Angela Wright has recently observed in her contribution to Terror and Wonder: The Gothic Imagination (ed. Dale Townshend, 2015), “from its eighteenth-century origins, and even, in some senses...