Excavating the Castle: Early Examples of the Gothic Concept and a Lost Tradition of Gothic Studies, 1814 - 1921

This book seeks to excavate the changing status of the Gothic within what, after Raymond Williams, we might call the selective tradition, from approximately 1814 to 1921. Excavating the Castle demonstrates that the Gothic novel was present in the selective tradition almost from its inception, was present in the first durable consolidation of English literary history written after its emergence, and that the Gothic concept crystalized more than half a century earlier than historians of the G...