"Gothic" by Fred Botting (Routledge, 1996)

The book charts the Gothic from being a reaction against the order and certainties of neo-classicism to postmodernism where "uncertainty perpetuates Gothic anxieties at the level of narrative and generic form" (p.168).

• "Gothic signifies a writing of excess ... Gothic writing remains fascinated by objects and practices that are constructed as negative, irrational, immoral and fantastic" (p.1)
• "Throughout the eighteenth century the sublime constituted a major area of debate among writers and theorists of taste" (p.3)
• "Uncertainties about the nature of power, law, society, family and sexuality dominate Gothic fiction ... The decade of the French Revolution was also the period when the Gothic novel was at its most popular" (p.5)
• "transgression is important not only as an interrogation of received rules and values, but in the identification, reconstitution or transformation of limits [though] the line between transgression and a restitution of acceptable limits remained a difficult one to discern. Some moral endings are little more than perfunctory tokens, thin excuses for salacious excesses" (p.8)
• "In the eighteenth century the emphasis was placed on expelling and objectifying threatening figures of darkness and evil, casting them out and restoring proper limits ... In the nineteenth century, the security and stability of social, political and aesthetic formulations are much more uncertain. ... Gothic became part of an internalised world of guilt, anxiety, despair, a world of individual transgression" (p.10)
• "One of the principal horrors lurking throughout Gothic fiction is the sense that there is no exit from the darkly illuminating labyrinth of language" (p.14)
• "In the United States, where the literary canon is composed of works in which the influence of romances and Gothic novels is far more overt, literature again seems virtually an effect of a Gothic tradition" (p.16)
• "The popularity of the Gothic novel highlights the way that the control of literary production was shifting away from the guardians of taste and towards the reading public" (p.47)
• "Many of the main ingredients of the genre that was to be known as the Gothic novel can be found in Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto ... The mixing of medieval romance and realistic novel tries to overcome the perceived limitations of both ... English Protestant culture is distinguished from the southern European, and thus Catholic, background which is constructed as both exotic and superstitious, fascinating but extreme in its aesthetic and religious sentiments" (p.48)
• "throughout Radcliffe's novels, it is the heroines who, though subjugated, persecuted and imprisoned, still escape ... Apart from the malevolent villains, men play a very small and generally ineffectual part in the narratives" (p.70)
• "In the period dominated by Romanticism, Gothic writing began to move inside" (p.91)
• "Frankenstein, though one of the texts now synomymous [sic] with Gothic, deploys standard Gothic conventions sparingly to bring the genre thoroughly and critically within the orbit of Romanticism" (p.101)
• "[Frankenstein] was dramatised, in burlesque and melodramatic forms, fifteen times by 1826. The theatre was important in the process of popularising Gothic terrors and horrors" (p.105)
• "In the mid-nineteenth century there is a significant diffusion of Gothic traces throughout literary and popular fiction, within the forms of realism, sensation novels and ghost stories, especially" (p.113)
• "At the end of the nineteenth century familiar Gothic figures - the double and the vampire - re-emerged in new shapes" (p.135)
• "It has been the cinema that has sustained Gothic fiction in the twentieth century" (p.156)
• "With Coppola's Dracula, then, Gothic dies, divested of its excesses, of its transgressions, horrors and diabolical laughter" (p.180)