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The Gothic by David Punter and Glennis Byron, Blackwell Guides to Literature (Oxford and Maiden, MA: Blackwell, 2004), ISBN 0-631-22063-1, xx + 315pp., £16.99 pb.
This contribution to the Blackwell Guides series is unabashedly a primer for students just beginning to understand Gothic fiction and film. It is more strictly introductory than (for example) The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction or the Gothic volume in the Blackwell Companions series and about on a par, as a provider of basic information, with The Handbook to Gothic Literature (Macmillan, 1998), edited by Marie Mulvey-Roberts. Unlike the Mulvey-Roberts volume, however, which is organized as an alphabetical encyclopedia about types, authors, national strains, and key ingredients of Gothic writing, this book - with all its segments written by one or both of its two accomplished authors - is divided into four large sections with short-to-moderate entries inside each, only one set of which is alphabetical. Following a seven-page 'Chronology' of Gothic works and a brief introduction, the first section, 'Backgrounds and Contexts', is arranged mostly in historical sequence and provides sweeping, but usually precise, basic looks at the main periods of'Gothic' (from the time of the actual 'Goths' and 'the Eighteenth Century' to 'Victorian' and 'Postcolonial Gothic'), important types of Gothic since its early days (including 'Gothic film' and the 'Graphic Novel'), and the interconnections of the Gothic with major cultural movements (such as 'Decadence', 'Postmodernism', and the 'Gothic Subcultures' of the late twentieth century). The second section is the alphabetical one and includes observant 'nutshell' accounts of authors, the vast majority of them British (from Ainsworth and Austen to WaIpole and Wilde), who have written works of at least some lasting importance in the Gothic tradition. section three is perhaps the most debatable, since it chronologically highlights and explains in 3-4 page Orientations' certain Gothic 'classics' of overriding importance (from The Castle of Otranto to Bret Easton Ellis's American PsycAo[1991]), thus inviting inevitable questions about selection criteria beyond such obvious choices as The Monk, Frankenstein and Dracula. Finally, there follows a sequence of short essays on 'Themes and Topics' that recur in Gothic writing throughout its historical development. These pieces try helpfully to define the key features of, and to start accounting for our fascination with, 'The Haunted...