Lady Audley’s Secret

New entry for the Wordsworth Editions Blog... When the category of ‘Sensation Fiction’ was first applied as a genre label in the Literary Budget periodical of November 1861, it coined a term for a new species of narrative that was at once innovative, soon-to-be hugely influential, and at the same time the next logical step…

‘Of Magic and Terror, and Mysterious Symbols’: Batman and the Discourse of the Literary Gothic

‘Of Magic and Terror, and Mysterious Symbols’: Batman and the Discourse of the Literary Gothic Stephen James Carver Ph.D. Previously unpublished, paper originally presented at the American Image/Text Conference, University of East Anglia, Norwich, June, 2011 Copyright © SJ Carver 2011, 2013 Like the reflection of Poe’s House of Usher in the ‘black and lurid…

‘The Phantom Steed’: The Outlaw Narrative of Rookwood

During the fourth book of Ainsworth’s gothic novel Rookwood (1834), in a chapter entitled ‘The Phantom Steed,’ the highwayman Dick Turpin becomes aware of a ghostly horseman riding by his side in the midnight mist during his fabled ride to York. Book IV is in fact called ‘The Ride to York,’ and is the dramatic…