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Ironically, despite its deep historic basis, the Gothic has always been a modern movement inspired by contemporary culture. Advances in science inspired Gothic writers such as Mary Shelley and Wilkie Collins. The Gothic is a technologically aware style and the attraction of the moving image is evidence of that. ‘The ghost in the machine’ shows how the Gothic was ideal for the medium of cinema, and how Gothic cinema was shaped by the social and political forces of the time, including the Great War trauma in Weimar Germany, mid-century isolationism in America, and British attempts at cultural renewal after the Second World War. ...Less

What are the true origins of modern crime fiction? ‘Origins’ explains that the sources can be found in 18th-century England with the fiction and criminal biographies of Daniel Defoe and Henry Fielding, who both had direct experience of criminality, the judicial system, and the punishments for the convicted—all topics of great public interest. Following the period of the 19th-century Newgate novels, the history of crime writing is dominated by three authors: Edgar Allan Poe, Wilkie Collins, and Arthur Conan Doyle. The Russian critic Tzvetan Todorov’s essay ‘The Typology of Detective Fiction’ provided a decisive account of how the genre works and of what differentiates it from other forms of novel writing. ...Less

‘Gender’ considers the work of women crime writers and central female characters in the crime novel. In the relatively few novels featuring a woman detective produced between the period of Holmes and the Golden Age the unaffiliated spinster—such as Christie’s Miss Marple—prevailed. The three most popular women crime fiction authors of recent decades—Sara Paretsky, Sue Grafton, and Patricia Cornwell—tell us a great deal about how notions of vehement masculinity have become so deeply embedded in the legacy of crime fiction, especially that branch of the genre which lays a claim towards realism. Each embodies a very pragmatic utilitarian brand of feminism. ...Less

‘International crime fiction’ looks at crime writing in France, Italy, Spain, Germany, Russia, East Asia, Latin America, and Scandinavia. Crime fiction in France was, and is, far more popular, diverse, and dynamic than in anywhere else in continental Europe. The regimes of Mussolini, Hitler, Franco, and Stalin banned crime fiction, but post-war writers, especially in Germany and Russia, adapted contemporaneous US models to their particular social and cultural milieu. Globally, crime fiction falls into two categories: those writers who adapted their work to the techniques first developed by Poe, Collins, and Conan Doyle; and those who attempted to remodel the genre. ...Less

Early in the twentieth century, a powerful union of science and social policy emerged in countries across the world. Eugenics was a movement committed to using the principles of heredity and of statistics to encourage healthy and discourage unhealthy reproduction. Throughout the twentieth century, but especially in the earlier decades, eugenics played a significant role in shaping government policy. ‘The world of eugenics’ outlines the links between eugenics and social reform and the differences between positive and negative eugenics. It discusses how Nazism and eugenics became so closely connected; the rise of eugenics in science and culture worldwide; the approach to eugenics by different religions; and finally the forms of resistance to eugenics. ...Less

Gothic novels inspired a new genre of writers known later as the Romantics who harked back to the romances of the Middle Ages. Writers such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge and John Keats and artists such as Henry Fuseli and Caspar David Friedrich shared an interest in the sublime, the infinite, self-identity, rebellion, and the past. The Gothic also inspired such writers as Charles Dickens and Oscar Wilde, and political thinkers such as Thomas Carlyle and Karl Marx. ‘The poetics of blood’ considers Gothic romanticism, and the contemporary influences of science (which gave birth to the notion of vampires) and politics on the explosion of Gothic-inspired creativity of the era. ...Less

Why, when reading is so private an activity, should people want, so simultaneously, the one ‘book of the day’? ‘The modern scene’ evokes the history of bestsellerism in images such as customers jostling to buy copies of Scott's Rob Roy in 1819, Lady Chatterley's Lover in 1960 or, more recently, Harry Potter. The top of the bestseller list is, culturally, the slipperiest of poles. Few titles survive more than a few months. Where occasional comebacks have been achieved, there is invariably some easily identified extraneous factor such as a TV or film adaptation. Bestsellers rarely repay close literary-critical attention, but are among the most informative literary-historical evidence available. ...Less

‘Madness confined’ reviews the care of the mad from the 18th to the mid-20th century. Initially, treatment was based on a humoral approach, combined with the use of chains and other mechanical restraints. Increasing numbers of institutions devoted to the confinement of the mad in the 18th century experimented with differing approaches to their management. The belief arose that maniac's frenzied behaviour resulted from misguided methods. The 19th century saw extraordinary optimism about the therapeutic possibilities of asylums and many were built, creating opportunities for experts in the diagnosis and treatment of madness. Social Darwinism eventually fed into eugenics and ultimately the conclusion that the insane should be eliminated. ...Less

‘The British bestseller’ highlights the influence of cultural and commercial differences between Britain and the USA. The bestseller ‘machine’ arrived with Walter Scott. The early twentieth century was characterized by romances. John Buchan's espionage thrillers were immensely successful, as were Agatha Christie's detective novels. Wartime alliances saw the popularity of more literary American authors, such as Steinbeck. Television and films helped to popularize new works, such as Orwell's 1984, and revive others. With the TMA's disappearance, American books were aggressively exported to the UK and, by 2000, while British titles were often entirely absent from the American weekly bestseller lists American novels were conspicuous in the British lists. ...Less

Charles Dickens became an adjective in his own lifetime. By the 1850s, he was ‘Dickenesque’ and ‘Dickensy’; ‘Dickensian’ came in the decade after his death. Contradictions beset the many connotations of ‘Dickensian’: on one hand conviviality and good cheer; on the other oppression, injustice, poverty, and urban squalor. The meanings accruing around ‘Dickensian’ also have to do with his manner of writing, increasingly pejorative as Victorian fiction fell out of fashion. But Dickensian energy is something that always attracts. Dickens has been and always will be bigger than his books, as their spirits overflow into the conduits of communal affect. ...Less