Inventing the gothic corpse: the thrill of human remains in the eighteenth-century novel

'Inventing the Gothic Corpse' shows how a series of bold experiments in 18th-century British realist and Gothic fiction transform the dead body from an instructive icon into a thrill device.

For centuries, vivid images of the corpse were used to deliver a spiritual or political message; today they appear regularly in Gothic and horror stories as a source of macabre pleasure.

Yael Shapira's book tracks this change at it unfolds in 18th-century fiction, from the early novels of Aphra Behn and Daniel Defoe, through the groundbreaking mid-century works of Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding and Horace Walpole, to the Gothic fictions of Ann Radcliffe, Matthew Lewis, Charlotte Dacre and Minerva Press authors Isabella Kelly and Mrs. Carver.