'Gothic: an Illustrated History' by Roger Luckhurst (Thames & Hudson, 2021)

Do we really need yet another 'history of the Gothic'? What professor of English Literature at Birkbeck, Roger Luckhurst, does to justify writing one is to take a strictly analytic and thematic approach, breaking the multifarious extremity of the Gothic tradition into its constituent elements, into which the history emerges sidelong and in passing, Horace Walpole rubbing shoulders with modern film – lots of film, as it turns out, Dr Luckhurst’s preferred medium for illustrating how the Gothic has morphed into its contemporary manifestations. He identifies four domains of human thought in which the Gothic expresses itself – form (buildings and structures), landscape, ‘the Gothic compass’ (how the Gothic imagination orders the earth and beyond it), and monstrosity – each of which are then neatly divided into five sub-chapters. Sometimes these divisions are perhaps overly neat, as Gothic thinking about the far North and far South turn out not to be that different, and neither are the uncanny undoings of structure signified by ‘Tentacles’ and ‘Formless[ness]’, but the format allows Dr Luckhurst to examine ideas and themes in a fruitful way.

And this is, as the name suggests, an illustrated history - illustrated nothing short of sumptuously. This is not a physically big or even a long book, but it packs in 350 pictures and more. I think there’s a paperback edition, but I bought the hardback, and what with its heavy, embossed covers and thick, glossy paper making all those images shine, it’s almost too weighty to hold up in comfort. The prevalence of the pictures means the writing is brisk and concise, and even if just occasionally the pell-mell listing of films reflecting this or that theme gets a bit bewildering, if nothing else you’ll come away with a list of scary movies you want to look up. The mainstay of the book isn’t literature, but I was pleased to see Emily Dickinson get a mention: ‘One need not be a Chamber – to be Haunted’, she warned, and this beautiful book shows how right she was.