Introduction

Summary

Geographic location is a vital component in British Gothic literature, and the location of Gothic fiction has been of perennial interest among critics. If one looks at the Gothic locations chosen by British writers, including Horace Walpole, Ann Radcliffe, Matthew Lewis and a host of imitative Minerva Press novelists, Southern Europe was a popular setting. From a British Protestant perspective, the perception of Catholicism was adversarial, shaped by the cultural, religious, and political climate of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Cannon Schmitt has coined the term ‘alien nation’ to describe Gothic texts that establish a location culturally opposite to the writer's position, helping to conceptualise a sense of national identity. Further afield in fictional space, William Beckford's Islamic Arabo-Persian setting in Vathek (1786) capitalises on the British fascination with Oriental settings. We may observe how the legends and mythology associated with these places are made vehicles of terror and the supernatural. However, it would be a critical cliché to confine the genre to just fantasised regions abroad; English and Scottish locations are also found in the early Gothic novels of Clara Reeve and James Hogg. Within these locales, one can observe that Gothic narratives are often intertwined with local legends and tales related to the setting. To borrow a formulation from Catherine Spooner and Emma McEvoy about Gothic texts, it is a discernible tendency that ‘space characteristically becomes historicised and history becomes spatialised’.

The focus of this book is on Nordic culture and its association with Anglophone Gothic texts. A key argument I will present is that the familiar concept of the Gothic ‘Other’ becomes difficult to uphold in relation to Nordic terror. This is because writers saw the Nordic tradition as a part of their own cultural and ethnic history. Nordic pagan religion and folklore were seen not only to preserve cultural elements of a broader Germanic ethnic heritage but also to represent a direct lineage to the British past, as Scandinavians were known to have settled in Britain. I propose that British writers tackled the depiction of Nordic terrors as an element in a complex discussion about their historical heritage and the part it played in shaping the contemporary nation.