Gothic Contemporaries: The Haunted Text

[...]Walpole's The Castle of Otranto (1764) can be considered here as contemporaneous with both Shakespeare's Hamlet (1603) and Ellis' Lunar Park (2005) because the themes explored are "just as relevant to the seventeenth century as they are to the twenty-first" (3). The series preface, included at the beginning of the text, states that the intention of the Gothic Literary Studies series is to publish works "of interest to students of all levels" and I unfortunately cannot say that I would recommend this study to younger students or really to anyone not well versed in literary criticism of the Gothic. Watkiss's heavy reliance on the later work of Derrida and other complex literary criticism makes this a book I would only suggest to those with a strong interest in the subject and either a thorough background in theory or the willingness to do the necessary supplemental reading of those texts.