The Gothic is not a uniquely British phenomenon. Born with the first Industrial revolution, witnessing its peak in the years of Jacobine Terror and of Napoleon's wars, the Gothic trespasses national boundaries, hybridizing genres, subverting hierarchies, and dismantling all rules of good taste. While thrones shake and crowned heads fall, the 'excesses' of the Gothic intercepts the anxieties of an incessantly changing world, nourishing a disenchanted age through massive doses of marvel and of fear.

In proposing for the first time an organic overview of the Gothic as a European literary and aesthetic, this guide does not uniquely aim at orienting the reader in the meanders of a literary genre: by moving between illusionists and phantasmagorias, Egyptian mummies and Serbian revenants, secret societies and experiments in magnetism, it opens a window on the dark side of modernity, and on the cone of shadow that the Enlightenment cannot help but casting.

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