Chapter Sixteen argues that late-Romantic literature also reflects Europe’s new global consciousness, a product of the modern nation-state rather than of cosmopolitanism. What Goethe referred to as Weltliteratur is updated here as global literature. The chapter first defends the historical and theoretical application of globalisation to the Romantic context, linking it with the development of nationalism and imperialism, and in particular the increasingly transnational book trade. It then analyses this ‘global imaginary’ from a British perspective in Scott’s The Field of Waterloo, Mary Shelley’s The Last Man and Felicia Hemans’ Records of Woman. These texts show among other things how Britons reacted to their nation’s new global power and interconnectedness, which made them feel more dependent and vulnerable, but also contributed to a sense of ‘global sociality’. The last section briefly looks at how other European literatures likewise reflected their national as well as imperial anxieties in the wake of Napoleon, examining Scott’s influence abroad in a novel by de la Motte Fouqué.

The sixth and final chapter considers horror writing’s appropriation of flesh-caricature from writing descriptive of the human body, dismantling character’s place in formal realism. I explore the grotesquing of the disproportioned body in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and her short story ’Transformation’, and in Walter Scott’s dwarf characters, where the aesthetic type of the ’gigantic dwarf’ gives rise to a mode of writing I call ’horrid realism’. The second part of the chapter grounds horrid realism in eighteenth-century texts that imagine the literalisation of caricatúra, such as Thomas Browne’s depiction of the Hippocratic face, and the effects of swaddling bands and foundation garments as pictured by John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, William Buchan, William Cadogan, Mary Wollstonecraft, William Godwin and J. P. Malcolm.

‘The Arctic sublime’ was a Romantic subcategory in its own right because of the period’s fascination with Arctic vastness and awe-inspiring icescapes. This chapter examines some of the famous representations of the Arctic sublime, including Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Caspar David Friedrich’s painting Das Eismeer, but also lesser-known texts that illustrate the intense contemporary engagement with northern climes. The sources that were available to the public and helped create an image of the Arctic were not only literary or artistic representations but also travel accounts and stories of shipwrecks. The chapter traces the patriotic celebrations of explorers braving the deadly terrors of the Arctic as well the discourse that developed around the optical mirages and illusions in high latitudes. The latter are particularly pertinent as they fitted into a Burkean sense of sublime psychological disruption and disorientation. The chapter shows how the public could – virtually – occupy the Arctic and experience the thrill of its sublime landscapes in books and at exhibitions, while the actual Arctic remained enigmatic and unconquerable.

Reading Letitia Elizabeth Landon’s Romance and Reality (1831) and Mary Shelley’s Lodore (1835), Chapter 1 contends that silver-fork novels give narrative form to a spectral contemporary world, capturing in their topical depictions the quotidian spectacle of crowds and commodities, and the transformations of time, space, identity, and social place that were unfolding in a society permeated by the fashion system. These novels follow the broad currents of public opinion, moving through panoramas of character sketches, conversational styles, topical issues and tastes, and among the shops and sights of metropolitan life, in an effort to model for their readers the acumen and understanding of contemporary manners essential to modern life.

New resources have led to new insights into the history of English vocabulary. The appearance of machine-readable corpora has made it possible to contextualise particular idiolectal usages much more comprehensively than was possible until recently. Such developments have allowed, through the harnessing of the large bodies of data to be found in the Oxford English Dictionary and other resources, a much better understanding of intertextual engagement: what might be called authorial invention, the focus of this chapter. The chapter focuses on authorial invention during the Romantic period, with reference to three writers whose imaginative outputs drew profoundly on their understanding of medicine: Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834), Mary Shelley (1797–1851), and John Keats (1795–1821). As Richard Holmes has argued, Romanticism drew profoundly on its scientific inheritance, in the cases analysed here derived from direct or indirect encounters with thinkers such as Thomas Beddoes (1760–1808), Astley Cooper (1768–1841), William Cullen (1710–1790), and Erasmus Darwin (1731–1802). However, they transformed this inheritance through what Holmes terms ‘imaginative intensity’.

In “Natural History,” Ashton Nichols traces the development of natural history in literature and scientific writing from the ancient works of Pliny the Elder and Aristotle to the later ideas of Buffon, Humboldt, and Darwin. Nichols examines how eighteenth-century colonial expansion influenced the spread of ideas about nature as well as how new ideas of nature were represented by Romantic authors like Mary Shelley. Culminating in analysis of the works of Erasmus Darwin and his grandson Charles Darwin, the chapter explores the paradigm shift away from a static and unchanging nature and toward a more modern understanding of nature as dynamic, interconnected, and indifferent to human needs and desires.

Chapter 2 explores the 1814 collaboration between Mary and Percy Bysshe Shelley and extends scholarly attention to their travel journals, before discussing Frankenstein. Using the couple’s shared journal as a way of marking their convergence and redefinition of themselves from a singular identity to a shared pluralism, the journal’s entries witness a shared understanding – a sympathetic concord – between the couple. This close examination of the collaborative process indicates a willingness to assimilate and accommodate the other’s sentiments and formal constructs. While the narratives of these entries show the completion of each other’s thoughts and a reliance upon readerly circulation, the entries’ form also gestures to their defined plural identity through a vocal blending. With its sustained focus on the sympathetic communities developed by the couple and increased literary production as a result of this lived communal experience, I suggest that the Shelley collaboration ultimately shapes the narrative form of Frankenstein. The novel’s layered narrative of sympathetic texts makes possible a view of the collaborative compilation of the novel as a means of social reform: a view of society that relies upon the affective bonds of sympathy with a community of people, whether imaginative or genuine.

In the nineteenth century the corpse became central to medical education. In Britain, a growing number of private medical schools opened throughout the country, involving the rise of the demand for dead bodies. It is exactly around the same time that Gothic fiction was revamped and offered insights into the debates around medical practice and education. This chapter explores the links between the field of anatomy and the development of Gothic fiction in Britain in the nineteenth century. It points out how the Gothic dealt with medical practitioners’ treatment of the corpse and how Gothic narratives dramatised the tension between the stealing, cutting up, preservation, and exhibition of human remains in medical collections and the central part played by anatomical knowledge in medical science. By looking at texts by John Galt, Mary Shelley, and Samuel Warren, as well as Wilkie Collins and Robert Louis Stevenson, this chapter not only shows how literary texts capitalised on the Gothic paraphernalia to foreground the regulation (or lack thereof) of the practice of anatomy before the passing of the 1832 Anatomy Act, but also highlights how the Gothic enabled authors to record cultural responses to medical practice throughout the century.

Many critics struggle with defining the creature in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, as the novel offers a combined monstrosity–deformity concept that blurs the distinctions between moral and physical attributes. The critical focus on categorization, however, marginalizes Shelley’s interest in the ethics of looking, and, in particular, her interest in how looking constructs monstrosity/deformity. The novel reveals the failure of transformative vision in the case of monstrosity and deformity, and invites sympathy for the object of such failure by reiterating instances in which the uncanny is familiarized and vision is changed. The creature’s brief encounter with a blind character offers an opportunity for transformative listening, but this goes awry, and reinforces the central tragedy of the novel.

Legends about the vampire and the development of Gothic fiction took separate tracks throughout the eighteenth century in England and the rest of Europe. But they united decisively in S. T. Coleridge’s ‘Christabel’ (composed 1799–1800; published 1816), which then inspired the more symbolic uses of the vampire-figure in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) and John Polidori’s The Vampyre (1819). These works showed that the vampire could be a symbolic site for ‘abjecting’ (in Julia Kristeva’s sense of ‘throwing-off’) the most feared inconsistencies and conflicts at the heart of individuals and their whole culture. From there, this mating of fictive schemes, empowered by the Janus-faced nature of Gothic symbol-making, proliferated across the nineteenth century in plays, penny dreadfuls and fully-fledged novels. As these versions of the Gothic vampire progressed, so the range of deep conflicts that this figure could abject, individual and social, grew exponentially, as we can still see in texts ranging from Sir Walter Scott’s novels and Charles Nodier’s French plays in the 1810s and 1820s to Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Florence Marryat’s The Blood of the Vampire in the 1890s.

Written by the editors, this essay provides an Introduction to all three volumes of The Cambridge History of the Gothic. It proceeds by casting a self-reflexive glance at the notion of ‘history’ as it is represented in Gothic writing itself, arguing that, since its inception in the eighteenth century, Gothic has always occupied a fraught and complex position in relation to the practice of formal and official historiography. Second, it provides an overview of the volumes to follow, foregrounding the ways in which the essays brought together here, more than simply offering a rigorous ‘history’ of the Gothic, are preoccupied with the ways in which the Gothic has responded to, and been inscribed within, some of the determining historical events of Western civilisation, from the Sacking of Rome in AD 410 to the twenty-first century.

This chapter investigates the effect of climate change (along with the host of other anthropogenic effects on the planet that now fall under the rubric of the Anthropocene) on the concept of extinction, particularly, human extinction. Whereas previous concepts of human extinction - from religious apocalyptic to Darwinian evolutionary discourses - were capable of imagining extinction as an event of grandeur and promise of something greater, extinction in the Anthropocene is figured as a moment of profound and abject loss, namely, the loss not just of humans but of particular configuration of capitalist comfort and consumerism. This chapter examines the history of this now dominant perception of extinction, via Enlightenment, Romantic and modernist thought.

This chapter outlines the emergence of climate fiction and its key modes. It pays particular attention to the extent to which climate fiction has worked within the established conventions of literary realism, meeting the many representational challenges mounted by climate change. While it considers the extent to which realism is able to render the abstract and intangible phenomenon of climate change visible, it argues that there is also a significant body of writing on the subject which turns to alternative forms and narrative strategies in the effort to represent climate change, and manages to overcome some of the limitations of realism. In other words, where climate fiction meets the challenges of representing climate change, it has the potential to provide a space in which to address the Anthropocene’s emotional, ethical, and practical concerns.