Late Victorian Gothic Tales

By Henry JamesB.M. CrokerVernon Lee, et al.

Book Overview

The Victorian fin de siecle has many associations: the era of Decadence, The Yellow Book, the New Woman, the scandalous Oscar Wilde, the Empire on which the sun never set. This heady brew was caught nowhere better than in the revival of the Gothic tale in the late Victorian age, where the undead walked and evil curses, foul murder, doomed inheritance and sexual menace played on the stretched nerves of the new mass readerships. This anthology collects together some of the most famous examples of the Gothic tale in the 1890s, with stories by Arthur Conan Doyle, Vernon Lee, Henry James and Arthur Machen, as well as some lesser known yet superbly chilling tales from the era. The introduction explores the many reasons for the Gothic revival, and how it spoke to the anxieties of the moment.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0192804804
• ISBN13: 9780192804808
• Release Date: August 2005
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
• Length: 336 Pages
• Weight: 0.55 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 7.6" x 5.0"

Customer Reviews

No self-respecting gothic literature fan should be without this!

I collect Victorian Gothic stories and this is one of my favorites from my collection!! This book has a great sampling of the best gothic short stories written! It has Oscar Wilde's psychological thriller Lord Arthur Savile's Crime, Machen's classic The Great God Pan, and many other fantastic stories. Sheil's story, Vaila was particularly unnerving! He makes the reader feel like they are slowly descending into madness as he/she reads it!

A solid collection of late Victorian spookery

Luckhurst provides a thoughtful introduction to this collection of stories, but introduces an unnecessary eclecticism by including two French works.