The Oxford Book of Gothic Tales

by Baldick, Chris

• ISBN13: 9780192141941
• ISBN10: 0192141945
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 1992-05-14
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

"But sometimes when I wake in the grey morning, and between waking and sleeping, think of all those things that I must shut out from my sleeping and waking thoughts, I wonder was I right or was he? Was he mad, or was I idiotically incredulous? For--and it is this thing that haunts me--when I found them dead together in the vault, she had been buried five weeks. But the body that lay in John Hurst's arms, among the mouldering coffins of the Hursts of Hurstcote, was perfect and beautiful as when he first clasped her to his arms, a bride." E. Nesbit's "The Hursts of Hurstcote" is only one of the many stories found in The Oxford Book of Gothic Tales , the first anthology of this spinetingling genre. Though Gothic fiction has generally been identified with Walpole's"Castle of Otranto" and the works of Ann Radcliffe, these thirty-seven selections compiled by Chris Baldick provide a unique look at the genre's development into its present-day forms. We see standard gothic elements of incest, murder, and greed in "The Poisoner of Montremos," a late eighteenth-century story by Richard Cumberland. We find in Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher" the tale that set a new standard of decadence for Gothic stories. In Hawthorne's "Rappacini's Daughter," a young girl is raised on the very essence of poison. In Faulkner's "A Rose for Emily," a woman's death satisfies a neighborhood's curiosity with a bizarre discovery. In other tales, a ghost reveals his sin of parricide, madness drives a man to murder,and a young girl spends her lifetime locked in a single room. All these stories and more contain the common elements of the gothic tale: a warped sense of time, a claustrophobic setting, a link to archaic modes of thought, dynastic corruption, and the impression of a descent into disintegration. Yet they also reveal the progression of the genre from stories of feudal villains amid crumbling ruins to a greater level of sophistication in which writers brought the gothic tale out of its medieval setting, and placed it in the contemporary world. Bringing together the work of such writers as Robert Louis Stevenson, Eudora Welty, Thomas Hardy, Edgar Allan Poe, William Faulkner, Isak Dinesen, Arthur Conan Doyle, Joyce Carol Oates, Jorge Luis Borges, Eudora Welty, Patrick McGrath, and Isabel Allende, The Oxford Book of Gothic Tales presents a wide array of the sinister and unsettling for all lovers of ghost stories, fantasy, and horror.

Author Biography

About the Editor:
Chris Baldick is a Lecturer in English at the University of Lancaster. He is the author of In Frankenstein's Shadow: Myth andMonstrosity in Nineteenth-Century Writing (1987).

Table of Contents

Introduction
Beginnings
Sir Bertrand: A Fragment (1773)	p. 3
The Poisoner of Montremos (1791)	p. 7
The Friar's Tale (1792)	p. 12
Raymond: A Fragment (1799)	p. 23
The Parricide Punished (1799)	p. 27
The Ruins of the Abbey of Fitz-Martin (1801)	p. 31
The Vindictive Monk or The Fatal Ring (1802)	p. 51
The Nineteenth Century
The Astrologer's Prediction or The Maniac's Fate (1826)	p. 63
Andreas Vesalius the Anatomist (1833)	p. 70
Lady Eltringham or The Castle of Ratcliffe Cross (1836)	p. 82
The Fall of the House of Usher (1839)	p. 85
A Chapter in the History of a Tyrone Family (1839)	p. 102
Rappaccini's Daughter (1844)	p. 133
Selina Sedilia (1865)	p. 158
Jean-Ah Poquelin (1875)	p. 165
Olalla (1885)	p. 183
Barbara of the House of Grebe (1891)	p. 218
Bloody Blanche (1892)	p. 245
The Yellow Wall-Paper (1892)	p. 249
The Adventure of the Speckled Band (1892)	p. 264
Hurst of Hurstcote (1893)	p. 286
The Twentieth Century
A Vine on a House (1905)	p. 299
Jordan's End (1923)	p. 302
The Outsider (1926)	p. 316
A Rose for Emily (1930)	p. 322
A Rendezvous in Averoigne (1931)	p. 331
The Monkey (1934)	p. 344
Miss De Mannering of Asham (1935)	p. 386
The Vampire of Kaldenstein (1938)	p. 407
Clytie (1941)	p. 424
Sardonicus (1961)	p. 435
The Bloody Countess (1968)	p. 466
The Gospel According to Mark (1970)	p. 478
The Lady of the House of Love (1979)	p. 483
Secret Observations on the Goat-Girl (1988)	p. 498
Blood Disease (1988)	p. 502
If You Touched My Heart (1991)	p. 519
Notes	p. 527
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