Horace Walpole finishes his account of writing The Castle of Otranto (1764) with a wry look at its syntactics, confessing that late one night he “could not hold the pen to finish the sentence, but left Matilda and Isabella talking, in the middle of a paragraph.” A close look at the beginnings, middles, and ends not only of chapters but also of paragraphs and even sentences in this first gothic novel reveals syntactical passages behaving like subterranean passages. As readers, we often don’t know what’s coming until we turn the corner of the sentence and bump into it. The lack of quotation marks to distinguish dialogue (when quotation marks were entering into common use) repeatedly slides the reader down wrong turns; we mistake one speaker for another. Later editions would insert quotation marks, brightly lighting the syntactic interior. But what Walpole initiates for the gothic on the small level of typography and syntax as well as of atmosphere and plot is precisely the uneasiness of boundaries obscured and identities blurred. This chapter tracks the spatial implications of the shapes of sentences and the peculiarities of paragraphs in The Castle of Otranto to uncover a template of syntactical structures enacting gothic structures.

This essay examines Romantic-era circulating libraries as a case study in the ways that institutions rather than individual authors create literary subgenres. The argument draws upon sociologically oriented research in literary and media studies and draws analogies between the history of the novel and the history of cinema. The growth of circulating libraries in the late eighteenth century created new markets for popular fiction, and this in turn spurred the creation of novelistic subgenres and formulas such as the gothic novel, the historical novel, and the season novel as means to respond to readerly demand for new titles. Circulating library catalogues and the novels themselves provide evidence of the ways that novelistic titles and subtitles signal generic affiliation to readers through keywords.

In September 1968, regular British Vogue columnist Polly Devlin returned from a year working for the magazine’s sister publication in New York, and published a long article commenting on how, in her absence, the mood had changed.

This chapter considers nineteenth-century Irish Gothic literary production, beginning with the Romantic-era ‘trade Gothic’ and culminating in the ghost stories of the fin de siècle. Acknowledging the significance of the texts that have now become synonymous with ‘the Irish Gothic’, the argument nevertheless probes the primary position they have been accorded in Irish literary historiography, questioning the process of literary canonisation that has marginalised large swathes of Irish Gothic writing. It thus offers an analysis of lesser-known texts that highlight the diverse range and scope of Irish engagement with the Gothic mode, from the ‘first wave’ Gothics (1790s to early 1800s) that were often condemned as mere imitations of Ann Radcliffe, to mid-century periodical publications that demonstrate the continued influence of the Gothic mode in Ireland even after the demise of ‘the Gothic novel’. It furthermore queries the understanding of Irish Gothic as a predominantly Protestant literary mode written almost exclusively by men, exploring the rich body of Catholic Gothic texts as well as the central contribution made by women writers to the mode’s development.