"Romantic gothic fiction is not exciting. Gothic novels are not ghost stories. Gothic novels are not women's writing." Opening with these three theses, "The Gothic Text" undertakes a fresh approach to a much-studied mode. Marshall Brown combines the teleological approach to literary history developed in his "Preromanticism" with a European perspective on the one truly international literary form of its era. New insights into literary history and the history of ideas provide a framework for innovative close readings--of Horace Walpole's "The Castle of Otranto," Ann Radcliffe's "The Italian," and Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein," among others--that approach classics of the genre from unusual angles. The book also provides a thoroughly researched account of German romantic psychology as it developed out of Kant's idealist philosophy into a gothic sensibility. Accessibly written and argued in careful, lively detail, "The Gothic Text" gives many new impulses to the study of romanticism, nineteenth-century fiction, and the origins of psychoanalysis.