This monograph contains analyses of Gothic texts: literary works, films, and video games. It shows the expansion of the convention across the ages and the media. The studies aim at being instructive as well as inspirational for university teachers and students of the Gothic alike.

Anna K?dra-Kardela is Associate Professor of English Literature at Maria Curie-Sk?odowska University, Lublin (Poland). She published on metaphysical poetry, cognitive poetics, narratology, and the Anglo-Irish short story. Andrzej S?awomir Kowalczyk is Assistant Professor of English Literature at Maria Curie-Sk?odowska University, Lublin (Poland). His publications include studies in medieval drama, the supernatural in fiction, as well as utopia/dystopia in literature and film.

«This book is concerned with as a cultural category. The chapters discuss extra-canonical works representing uncharted fields within the domain of narrative fiction, film, and video games. The volume comprises original and illuminating studies, opening new vistas to the scholarly research into the Gothic.» (Prof. Joanna Kokot, The Warmia and Mazury University in Olsztyn, Poland) «This collection will appeal to anyone – general reader or specialist, student or teacher or scholar – with an interest in the Gothic or even just a casual curiosity about it. The essays will expand readers’ horizons as well as the Gothic canon, demonstrating to anyone who might not already realize it that the exuberantly undead Gothic mode continues both to entertain and to do the essential cultural work of conservation, subversion and recuperation.» (Prof. John M. Krafft, Miami University, Ohio)

Contents: Anna K?dra-Kardela/Andrzej S?awomir Kowalczyk: The Gothic Canon: Contexts, Features, Relationships, Perspectives – Artur Blaim: Gothic Castaways: Dreams, Demons and Monsters in Early Modern Desert Island Narratives – Wojciech Nowicki: Ambivalence and Ambiguity in Jane Austen’s – Aleksandra K?dzierska: - Charles Dickens’s Ghostly Academy – Dorota Babilas: The Undead Queen: Queen Victoria’s Afterlife in Gothic Fiction – Jorge Bastos da Silva: First-Person Noir: Murderousness and (Ir)rationality in Twentieth-Century Crime Fiction – Ludmi?a Gruszewska Blaim: Faculty Gothic in the American College Novel of the 1990s – Urszula Terentowicz-Fotyga: Competing Genres in the English Country House: by Sarah Waters – Jadwiga W?grodzka: Ghosts and Their Stories in Children’s Fiction – Justyna Galant: In the Bowels of a Gothic Microverse: as a Semiotic Palimpsest – Zofia Kolbuszewska: Gothic Automata and the Kunstkammer Island: by Quay Brothers – Marta Komsta: The Murder House, or the Archaic Mother in – Pawel Frelik: Gothic Videogames.