This was the way matters stood in 1969 when Robert Hume published “Gothic Versus Romantic: a Revaluation of the Gothic Novel” in the flagship journal of America’s Modern Language Association, PMLA. To reread Hume’s essay today is to be surprised by the modesty of its claims – since it points to conventions, aesthetics, and reading experiences shared by Gothic and Romantic texts and their readers – and by the energy with which these claims were attacked by another scholar, Robert Platzer, in a “Rejoinder” published as a companion piece to it. Their exchange resembles another, better-known dispute between Arthur Lovejoy and René Wellek over the nature of Romanticism. There Lovejoy had attacked Wellek’s holistic definition of Romanticism by pointing to its exceptions. Here Platzer took a similar approach: attacking the fundamental vagueness of the categories of “Gothic” and “Romantic”; allowing for common thematic preoccupations but no closer relation; and arguing for the two terms as part of an overarching “continuum” of print culture. Sharing subject matter and themes, he claimed, did not amount to sharing consciousness, and only the most selective account of both movements could point to real common ground or direct and unmediated influence (Platzer, “Gothic Versus Romantic: Rejoinder,” pp. 270–71).