From Wollstonecraft to Stoker

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

This collection of 13 essays examines the work of Victorian authors Wilkie Collins, M.E. Braddon, Letitia Elizabeth Landon, Mary Wollstonecraft, J. Sheridan Le Fanu, Bram Stoker, Charles Dickens, Robert Louis Stevenson, Elizabeth Gaskell, Henry James and Charlotte Bronte. Each essay explores their use of archetypal Gothic elements, such as dark secrets and forbidden sensations, to depict nineteenth-century attitudes to class, gender, race, colonialism and imperialism.

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• Acknowledgements (p. v)
• Introduction (p. 1)
• Part 1 The Instability of Identity: Character, Class, and Gender
• Desire and Fear: Feminine Abjection in the Gothic Fiction of (p. 17)
• "The Maiden Felt Hot Pain": Agency and Passivity in the Work of Letitia Elizabeth Landon (p. 30)
• "Portrait of a governess, disconnected, poor, and plain": Staging the Spectral Self in Charlotte Bront&eumlet;'s Jane Eyre (p. 49)
• A Shock to the System, a System to the Shocks: The Horrors of the "Happy Ending" in The Woman in White (p. 62)
• Hysterical Sensations: Bodies in Action in Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White (p. 79)
• Part 2 The Colonial Context of Gothic and Sensation Fiction
• Sensations Down Under: Australia's Seismic Charge in Great Expectations and Lady Audley's Secret (p. 91)
• Reading Between the (Blood)lines of Victorian Vampires: Mary Elizabeth Braddon's "Good Lady Ducayne" (p. 102)
• The Vamp and the Good English Mother: Female Roles in Le Fanu's Carmilla and Stoker's Dracula (p. 120)
• Liminality and Power in Bram Stoker's Jewel of Seven Stars (p. 132)
• Part 3 Fallen Woman, Fallen Man in the Victorian Novel
• Ruth: An Analysis of the Victorian Signifieds (p. 147)
• Violence as Patrimony in Le Fanu's Uncle Silas (p. 164)
• In the Company of Men: Masculinity Gone Wild in Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr Hyde (p. 172)
• Ghostly Absence and Sexual Presence in James's "Owen Wingrave" and "The Jolly Corner" (p. 193)
• About the Contributors (p. 207)
• Index (p. 211)