Gothic Dreams and Nightmares

"Written by an international group of experts, including leading and lesser known scholars, this interdisciplinary study promotes the reconsideration of the vastly under-theorised role of the subliminal in the Gothic. It begins with an exploration of the varied intellectual and cultural matrices of the eighteenth- and nineteenth- century Gothic, recognising the Gothic's frequent oneiric inspiration, thematic focus, and atmospherics. This line of inspirational transmission and aesthetic experimentation with the subliminal was often signposted by the artists themselves. It goes on to examine the range of literary forms and experimental aesthetics through which these phenomena were conceived - from Horace Walpole's incorporation of Giovanni Battista Piranesi's 'sublime dream' in The Castle of Otranto into the early Gothic novel and Romantic poetry, through the paintings of Henry Fuseli and Francisco Goya, nineteenth-century British and European Gothic novels and short stories, into Surrealism and twenty-first-century visual media"-- Page 4 of cover.