Distributed for University of Wales Press
Cornish Gothic
A literary history of Cornwall in the Victorian imagination.
What comes to mind when we think of Cornwall? Wild coastlines, golden beaches, sooty miners, and Cornish pasties, perhaps. In the nineteenth century, however, it was considered a frightening and threatening space. This book details the “discovery” of Cornwall in the popular imagination as the Victorians expanded the rail network and how Cornwall was seen as both a foreign nation on England’s doorstep and as a haunted place, full of ghosts, ghouls, monsters, and legends. Proposing a distinctly Cornish Gothic tradition, Joan Passey’s study offers major new readings of writers such as Alfred Tennyson, Thomas Hardy, Wilkie Collins, and Mary Elizabeth Braddon, and introduces many Cornish writers to a broader readership.
What comes to mind when we think of Cornwall? Wild coastlines, golden beaches, sooty miners, and Cornish pasties, perhaps. In the nineteenth century, however, it was considered a frightening and threatening space. This book details the “discovery” of Cornwall in the popular imagination as the Victorians expanded the rail network and how Cornwall was seen as both a foreign nation on England’s doorstep and as a haunted place, full of ghosts, ghouls, monsters, and legends. Proposing a distinctly Cornish Gothic tradition, Joan Passey’s study offers major new readings of writers such as Alfred Tennyson, Thomas Hardy, Wilkie Collins, and Mary Elizabeth Braddon, and introduces many Cornish writers to a broader readership.
Reviews
Table of Contents
Introduction
Part One: Environments
Chapter One: ‘If there’s got to be wrecks, please send them to we’: Seascapes and Shipwrecks
Chapter Two: ‘The dead lay buried and yet unburied’: Minescapes and the Subterranean World
Part Two: Myths and Legends
Chapter Three: ’There were plenty of people that could tell those stories once’: Folklore and Drolls of Cornwall
Chapter Four: ‘A phantom to proclaim their hoary and solitary age’: Cornish Ghosts and Hauntings
Part Three: Travel, Tourism, and Modernity
Chapter Five: ’Out of the sound of the railway whistle’: Gothic Travel and the Birth of Tourism
Chapter Six: ‘The poet gives all his votes to us’: King Arthur in Tintagel
Conclusion
Part One: Environments
Chapter One: ‘If there’s got to be wrecks, please send them to we’: Seascapes and Shipwrecks
Chapter Two: ‘The dead lay buried and yet unburied’: Minescapes and the Subterranean World
Part Two: Myths and Legends
Chapter Three: ’There were plenty of people that could tell those stories once’: Folklore and Drolls of Cornwall
Chapter Four: ‘A phantom to proclaim their hoary and solitary age’: Cornish Ghosts and Hauntings
Part Three: Travel, Tourism, and Modernity
Chapter Five: ’Out of the sound of the railway whistle’: Gothic Travel and the Birth of Tourism
Chapter Six: ‘The poet gives all his votes to us’: King Arthur in Tintagel
Conclusion