From reviews of the previous edition:

“It offers a range of strategies for understanding the genre, and is an excellent resource for students, teachers, and scholars of the Gothic.”

Gothic Studies

Gothic Studies“Useful to newcomer and scholar alike … Punter’s volume is sure to be a standard reference for some time.”

Choice

Now thoroughly expanded and updated, this widely acclaimed Companion provides a series of stimulating insights into Gothic writing, its history, and its genealogy. The volume offers comprehensive coverage of criticism of the Gothic and of the various theoretical approaches it has inspired and spawned.

This new edition now contains twelve brand new essays; six of these constitute an additional part on “The Globalization of Gothic,” which provides an invaluable reflection on the direction Gothic criticism has taken over the last decade. The additional six contributions cover the topics of Gothic Shakespeare, the Gothic ballad, the Gothic sublime, Gothic and the graphic novel, Goth culture, and the Gothic and hospitality. Original essays have, where necessary, been revised and updated to reflect the very latest debates in the discipline. The volume begins with a substantial introduction, individual chapters feature lists of primary and secondary bibliographic materials, and the essays are written by leading scholars in the field.

David Punter is widely recognized as the founder of modern criticism of the Gothic, and is therefore ideally placed to edit what has become the standard reference work for scholars and students of Gothic.

David Punter is Professor of English at the University of Bristol. He has written extensively on Gothic, romantic, and modern literature, literary theory, and psychoanalysis, as well as producing four volumes of poetry. His recent publications include The Gothic (with Glennis Byron, Blackwell, 2004), Metaphor (2007), Modernity (2007), and Rapture: Literature, Addiction, Secrecy (2009).

George Eliot is widely viewed as the finest English novelist of the nineteenth century, the era in which the form reached its zenith. Her voluminous output, matched by an equally unbounded intellectual depth and nuanced social commentary, brims with insight into every aspect of culture and society, moving effortlessly between topics including religion, ethics, the law, finance, politics, science and aesthetics. The essays in this collection offer students and scholars of her work a timely critical reappraisal of her corpus, including her poetry and non-fiction, that reflects the latest developments in literary criticism. The contributors, all leading Eliot scholars, draw on some of the most innovative work in the field, exploring the relation between Eliot’s concerns and those of our own era, and assessing her work in the context of contemporary academic interests such as religion and secularism, internationalism and cosmopolitanism, and ethics and aesthetics.

Amanda Anderson is the Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Humanities and English at Brown University, USA, and Director of the School of Criticism and Theory. Prior to joining the Brown faculty in 2012, she taught at Johns Hopkins University, where she served as department chair from 2003–2009. She is the author of The Way We Argue Now: A Study in the Cultures of Theory (2006), The Powers of Distance: Cosmopolitanism and the Cultivation of Detachment (2001), and Tainted Souls and Painted Faces: The Rhetoric of Fallenness in Victorian Culture (1993). Prof Anderson has also co-edited, with Joseph Valente, Disciplinarity at the Fin de Siècle (2002).

Harry E. Shaw is Professor of English at Cornell University, USA, where he has been teaching since 1978. Specializing in nineteenth-century English novels and narrative poetics, he explores the influence of the British novel on the rise of historical consciousness in Europe, and the ways in which novels help us conceptualize our place in history. He is the author of The Forms of Historical Fiction: Sir Walter Scott and his Successors (1983) and Narrating Reality: Austen, Scott, Eliot (1999), and co-author of Reading the Nineteenth-Century Novel: Austen to Eliot 2008.

George Eliot is widely viewed as the finest English novelist of the nineteenth century, the era in which the form reached its zenith. Her voluminous output, matched by an equally unbounded intellectual depth and nuanced social commentary, brims with insight into every aspect of culture and society, moving effortlessly between topics including religion, ethics, the law, finance, politics, science and aesthetics. The essays in this collection offer students and scholars of her work a timely critical reappraisal of her corpus, including her poetry and non-fiction, that reflects the latest developments in literary criticism. The contributors, all leading Eliot scholars, draw on some of the most innovative work in the field, exploring the relation between Eliot’s concerns and those of our own era, and assessing her work in the context of contemporary academic interests such as religion and secularism, internationalism and cosmopolitanism, and ethics and aesthetics.

Amanda Anderson is the Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Humanities and English at Brown University, USA, and Director of the School of Criticism and Theory. Prior to joining the Brown faculty in 2012, she taught at Johns Hopkins University, where she served as department chair from 2003–2009. She is the author of The Way We Argue Now: A Study in the Cultures of Theory (2006), The Powers of Distance: Cosmopolitanism and the Cultivation of Detachment (2001), and Tainted Souls and Painted Faces: The Rhetoric of Fallenness in Victorian Culture (1993). Prof Anderson has also co-edited, with Joseph Valente, Disciplinarity at the Fin de Siècle (2002).

Harry E. Shaw is Professor of English at Cornell University, USA, where he has been teaching since 1978. Specializing in nineteenth-century English novels and narrative poetics, he explores the influence of the British novel on the rise of historical consciousness in Europe, and the ways in which novels help us conceptualize our place in history. He is the author of The Forms of Historical Fiction: Sir Walter Scott and his Successors (1983) and Narrating Reality: Austen, Scott, Eliot (1999), and co-author of Reading the Nineteenth-Century Novel: Austen to Eliot 2008.