Castle at the Crossroads: The Gothic and Other Genres

This project hypothesizes that the similarities between the Gothic and other genres that emerge before, concurrently with, and after it are much more prevalent than most literary histories have argued. Contrary to conceptions of literary history that frame forms of “genre fiction” separately from each other and from forms of realism, this project uses supervised models to map out the proximity of genres in the long nineteenth century. We pose the Gothic – which bears connections to other genres such as historical fiction, novels of manners, and sensation fiction – as a potential center for genres’ links. With this reconfiguration, this project explores unexpected similarities and connections between genres often otherwise studied separately and argues that the Gothic is a way to link them.