Angela Toscano’s chapter (Chapter 4) on Gothic romance explores what was, in the 1960s, the most popular version of the romance novel. Drawing on important early work on the Gothic popular romance by Joanna Russ, Toscano details the conventions of this subgenre, documents the history of Gothic romance criticism during its heyday and after, and makes the case that scholars of the Gothic tradition in literature can benefit from the study of this now-neglected corpus, even as popular romance scholarship can learn from the robust and theoretically-sophisticated world of scholarship on Gothic. (13)
From the Introduction to the volume:
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