Introduction
1. Touched by the dead: eighteenth-century Gothic poetics
2. Mourning, memory and melancholy: constructing death in the 1790s-1820s
3. From writing to reading: Poe, Brontë and Eliot
4. Gothic death and Dickens: executions, graves and dreams
5. Loving the undead: Haggard, Stoker and Wilde
6. Decoding the dying: Machen and Stoker
Conclusion
Index

Gothic death 1740-1914 explores the representations of death and dying in Gothic narratives published between the mid-eighteenth century and the beginning of the First World War. The book challenges ideas about the presence of a Gothic uncanny in the period by exploring how the dead either inspire empathy or become objects of scientific scrutiny. From Graveyard Poetry to the Gothic of the early twentieth century, images of the dead are used to explore ideas about sympathy, mourning and love. This narrative of death in the Gothic is paralleled by a movement from writing to reading in which the cultural emphasis shifts from concerns about how to represent the dead to a focus on decoding the meaning of death.

Writers explored include Thomas Gray, Edward Young, Ann Radcliffe, Mary Shelley, James Boaden, Edgar Allan Poe, Emily Brontë, George Eliot, Charles Dickens, Henry Rider Haggard, Bram Stoker, Oscar Wilde and Arthur Machen. Whilst this is a literary history of the representations of death in the Gothic it also explores and explains the various religious, political and scientific contexts which informed this Gothic tradition.

This book will be of interest to academics and students working on literature on the Gothic and more generally on the literary culture of the period.