The Oxford Book of Gothic Tales

The Gothic tale has been with us for over 200 years, and this collection illustrates the continuing strength of this fictional tradition from the late 18th century to the present day.

Gothic fiction is generally identified with Horace Walpole's "Castle of Otranto" and the works of Ann Radcliffe, and with heroes and heroines menaced by feudal villains amid crumbling ruins.

While the repertoire of claustrophobic settings, gloomy themes, and threatening atmosphere established the Gothic genre, later writers from Poe onwards achieved a greater sophistication, and a shift in emphasis from cruelty to decadence.

Modern Gothic is distinguished by its imaginative variety of voice, from the chilling depiction of a disordered mind to the sinister suggestion of vampirism.

This anthology brings together the work of writers such as Le Fanu, Hawthorne, Hardy, Faulkner and Borges with their earliest literary forebears, and emphasizes the central role of women writers from Anna Laetitia Aikin to Isabel Allende. While the Gothic tale shares some characteristics with the ghost story and tales of horror and fantasy, the present volume celebrates the distinctive features that define this powerful and unsettling literary form.