Popular Revenantsis the first book in English dedicated solely to the German gothic to be published in over thirty years. It is intended to introduce new research for students and researchers in German studies and English studies alike. Many readers will have encountered the term Schauerroman (shudder novel) or article-length discussions of German influences on gothic writers, but it is our view that they have not been well served by existing writing on the subject, much of which is outdated, piecemeal, or not well grounded in German studies. Readers looking for information in English on the Schauerroman or German gothic have had to rely either on Hadley's 1978 monograph The Undiscovered Genre or on brief articles such as those found in the Handbook of the Gothic, edited by Marie Mulvey-Roberts, or in Avril Horner's European Gothic. While this deficit has been partly redressed by Daniel Hall's French and German Gothic Fiction in the Late Eighteenth Century (2005), there is a clear need for a single book dedicated to the afterlife of the German gothic beyond 1800 — one that attends to the gothic as a literary mode “forged in the crucible of translation” and capable of infiltrating other discourses and media.

The term “gothic” is partly the product of the debate about a set of popular writings in the 1790s and partly a critical construction used to encompass a wide range of generically related cultural phenomena extending down to the present day.