Ever since the era of Romanticism, it has been a commonplace to link language and literature to ideas of nationhood. The ideal “nation” is understood to be one that unites all people speaking the same language within a common territory, effectively constituting a nation-state. This principle undergirds most nineteenth- and twentieth-century processes of nation formation in Europe. In some cases, this has led to the breakup of larger territorial units organized along earlier and different principles into smaller units. In other cases, it has led to the unification of territories previously divided. Notwithstanding the principle cited, many of the countries thus constituted have within their borders linguistic minorities. Some European countries have no language of their own, using one or more languages that are claimed, and usually also perceived, as the “national” language of other, bigger countries. In all instances, literature, as the most visible and enduring embodiment of a people’s language, serves as a binding element.

This introductory chapter charts the major directions that the Gothic aesthetic took in Britain, America and Europe over the course of the nineteenth century. Commencing with an account of the critical formation and consolidation of the notion of ‘Gothic literature’ itself, it discusses the critical work of figures such as Nathan Drake, Walter Scott, George Stillman Hillard and Edmund Gosse. Showing the extent to which this literary-historical category was defined against, and in relation to, canonical British Romanticism, it surveys the anti-Gothic rhetoric of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth, William Hazlitt and others. Through consideration of the work of Thomas B. Shaw, William John Courthope and Edward Dowden, it tracks the persistence of such Romantic attitudes in the literary historiography of the nineteenth century. Exploring, in its final sections, the volume’s contents, the Introduction situates the chapters that follow in relation to some of the major developments in literary, historiographical and architectural Gothic culture across the nineteenth century.