OUT NOW: Penny Dreadfuls and the Gothic: Investigations of Pernicious Tales of Terror, edited by Nicole C. Dittmer and Sophie Raine (University of Wales Press, 2023)

A new academic collection of essays exploring penny dreadfuls, including my chapter on Wagner the Wehr-Wolf and the work of George Reynolds...

Penny Dreadfuls and the Gothic breaks new ground in uncovering penny titles which have been hitherto largely neglected from literary discourse revealing the cultural, social and literary significance of these working-class texts. The present volume is a reappraisal of penny dreadfuls, demonstrating their cruciality in both our understanding of working-class Victorian Literature and the Gothic mode. This edited collection of essays provides new insights into the fields of Victorian literature, popular culture and Gothic fiction more broadly; it is divided into three sections, whose titles replicate the dual titles offered by penny publications during the nineteenth century. Sections one and two consist of three chapters, while section three consists of four essays, all of which intertwine to create an in-depth and intertextual exposition of Victorian society, literature, and gothic representations.

Contents:

- Introduction: Dreadful Beginnings by Nicole C. Dittmer and Sophie Raine

Section One: The Progression of Pennys; or, Adaptations and Legacies of the Dreadful

- Penny Pinching: Reassessing the Gothic Canon Through Nineteenth-Century Reprinting by Hannah-Freya Blake and Marie Léger-St-Jean
- “As long as you are industrious, you will get on very well”: Adapting The String of Pearls’ Economies of Horror by Brontë Schiltz
- “Your lot is wretched, old man”: Anxieties of Industry, Empire and England in George Reynolds’s Wagner, the Wehr-Wolf by Hannah Priest

Section Two: Victorian Medical Sciences and Penny fiction; or, Dreadful Discourses of the Gothic

- ‘Embalmed pestilence’, ‘intoxicating poisons’: Rhetoric of Contamination, Contagion, and the Gothic Marginalisation of Penny Dreadfuls by their Contemporary Critics by Manon Burz-Labrande
- “A Tale of the Plague”: Anti-Medical Sentiment and Epidemic Disease in Early Victorian Popular Gothic Fiction by Joseph Crawford
- “Mistress of the broomstick”: Biology, Ecosemiotics, and Monstrous Women in Wizard’s The Wild Witch of the Heath; or the Demon of the Glen by Nicole C. Dittmer

Section Three: Mode, Genre, and Style; or, Gothic Storytelling and Ideologies

- A Ventriloquist and a Highwayman Walk into an Inn... Early Penny Bloods and the Politics of Humour in Jack Rann and Valentine Vaux by Celine Frohn
- Gothic Ideology and Religious Politics in James Malcolm Rymer’s Penny Fiction by Rebecca Nesvet
- “Muddling about among the dead”: Found Manuscripts and Metafictional Storytelling in James Malcolm Rymer’s Newgate: A Romance by Sophie Raine

For more information, please visit the University of Wales website.