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THE CAMBRIDGE COMPANION TO GOTHIC FICTION Jerrold E. Hogle, Ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002
"There has never... been any period of Gothic English literature, but the list of Gothic revivalists stretches completely across its entire history, from the Beowulf poet to writers of our own day."
-Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism
The centremost essay in The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction, Jeffrey N. Cox's "English Gothic theatre," opens with the above quote by Northrop Frye. Frye's argument concerning the "persistent nostalgia" of Gothic romance can be seen to reflect the premise of this new collection of specially commissioned critical writings on the Gothic. Edited by Jerrold E. Hogle, The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction consists of accessible essays written by leading Gothic scholars who specialize in a range of periods, national literatures, and narrative forms. The fourteen essays comprised in the volume offer a loosely chronological survey of Gothic fiction from the 1760s to the present. Together they introduce the reader to key themes and conventions of the Gothic, describe various social and aesthetic contexts that shaped the genre, and represent the major critical approaches in Gothic studies.
Like Blackwell's A Companion to the Gothic (2000), edited by David Punter, which covers many of the same topics and includes essays...