Matthew Gregory Lewis: The Gothic and Romantic Literary Culture

A comprehensive account of the works of eighteenth-century English writer Matthew Gregory Lewis, identifying him as an important contributor to Gothic and Romantic literature.

Matthew Gregory Lewis was one of the most prolific, versatile, and influential British writers of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Matthew Gregory Lewis: The Gothic and Romantic Literary Culture is a literary history of Lewis’s oeuvre and is the first to closely situate him in relation to Gothic and Romantic literary culture more broadly. Across an extended introduction and six chapters, the argument offers fresh considerations of Lewis’s well-known Gothic works, drawing upon the biographical studies of earlier critics when necessary. Based on rigorous archival research undertaken in the UK, North America, and the Caribbean, this book offers fresh interpretations of such well-known works as The Monk (1796) and The Castle Spectre (1797). It also draws into focus Lewis’s other works ranging from his youth through to his romances and shorter tales, dramas, translations, adaptations, ballads, poetry, and editorial endeavors, as well as his posthumously published writings on slavery.

Dale Townshend is professor of Gothic literature at the Manchester Centre for Gothic Studies at Manchester Metropolitan University. He has published widely in the field of eighteenth and nineteenth-century Gothic writing.