New England's Gothic Literature History and Folklore of the S... by Faye Ringel

The gothic novels of that period were almost entirely a British phenomenon, and the lone American representative of any consequence, Charles Brockden Brown, did not attain widespread recognition.

Although relatively few of Poe's works could be considered ghost stories or even super-natural tales in the strictest sense, he effected a radical revolution of the conventions of gothic literature that had already become stale in the two generations after their initiation in Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto (1764). In the United States, the shadow of Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849) loomed large in this domain for a century after his death. In recent years the terms 'super-natural fiction' or 'weird fiction' have been proposed as more representative of the wide range of conceptionsĮxhibited by such literature, but whatever genre designation one uses, the works to be studied here have in common the suggestion of at least a single departure from mimetic realism, whether that suggestion is ultimately explained away naturalistically or is made for symbolic, metaphorical, or allegorical purposes. The term 'ghost story' has been widely employed to denote an entire range of literary works that suggest the existence of supernatural entities, whether they be actual ghosts or other creatures such as vampires, were-wolves, witches, or revenants (the dead revived to a semblance of life) the term has even been used, over the objections of some theorists, to denote works embodying supernatural scenarios of a broader kind, such as haunted houses, fantastic voyages, or speculative tales of the future.

New England's Gothic Literature History and Folklore of the S... by Faye Ringel