Dale Townshend and Angela Wright, eds., The Cambridge History of the Gothic: Volume II. Gothic in the Nineteenth Century. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2020. Pp. xvii + 541. £120.00. ISBN 9781108472715.

Given the proliferation of guides and companions to the gothic, readers encountering Cambridge's three-volume History of the Gothic may ask: what is left to be said? Dale Townshend and Angela Wright's second volume, Gothic in the Nineteenth Century, answers that question succinctly: a lot. Seasoned scholars and readers new to Gothic studies will find the book a well-organised, thoroughly researched, and accessible read.

Following a first volume on the long eighteenth century, Townshend begins volume two with a detailed historicization of the term gothic: whereas the term was firmly associated with the medieval in the eighteenth century, in the early nineteenth century, 'Gothic would lose many of its older historical and political meanings and come to serve as the name for the modern literature of horror and terror, wonder and supernatural enchantment' (4). Townshend identifies key gothic figures and tropes, discusses overlaps and oppositions between Romanticism and the Gothic, and highlights Gothic's shift from genre to mode by the late nineteenth century.

The book's initial chapters reveal crucial Gothic influences. Madeleine Callaghan and Angela Wright flesh out the well-known Summer of 1816 that spawned Lord Byron's 'Darkness' and Manfred, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, and John Polidori's The Vampyre. Maximiliaan Van Woudenberg builds on this by showing how Jean-Baptiste Benoît Eyriès's 1812 translation of German supernatural tales inspired the ghost-story competition at the Villa Diodati and provides a genealogy of the book's many editions and variant stories. In this cluster's last chapter, Jerrold E. Hogle uncovers the origins and permutations of the vampire throughout the nineteenth century, ranging from Samuel Taylor Coleridge's Christabel, Shelley's Frankenstein, and Polidori's The Vampyre through Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights, Thomas Peckett Prest or James Malcom Rymer's Varney the Vampire, J.S. Le Fanu's Carmilla, and Bram Stoker's Dracula. Hogle casts a wide net, and, including metaphorical vampires (often of the class-climbing variety), expands his genealogy. But the chapter also conflates two very different types of vampire, the literal and the metaphorical.

The next section digs into Victorian Gothic. Tom Duggett argues for gothic resonances between Robert Southey in 1817 and Victorian stalwarts like William Morris, John Ruskin, and Thomas Carlyle around 1877. Alexandra Warwick's chapter shifts the conversation around Morris and Ruskin (adding A.W.N. Pugin) to engage debates over Gothic architecture. Anthony Mandal offers a nuanced analysis of the often-neglected subgenres of Gothic chapbooks, blue books, penny bloods, and penny dreadfuls. Four additional chapters examine Victorian Gothic poetry, the origins of the Victorian ghost story, gothic elements within Charles Dickens's work, and Victorian symbolic mother-daughter relations in domestic gothic in ways that word counts prevent me from doing justice. Kelly Jones's chapter on Victorian Gothic theatricality rounds out this section by arguing that 'as the fin de siècle loomed, attempts to repress the Gothic on stage were met with an increasingly Gothic representation of the theatre itself within the wider popular and literary imagination' (163).

Readers interested in technological advances and their social impact will find reverberations among Jones's essay, Joe Kember's work on magic lantern shows across the century, Corinna Wagner's discussion of Darwin's influence on Victorian depictions of monstrosity, and William Hughes's vivid essay on the Gothic aspects of the emerging railway system.

Surprisingly, the volume contains only two essays on American Gothic. Setting aside his antiquated use of 'Indian' (a term long ago supplanted by Native American, American Indian, and/or Indigenous in the US), Charles L. Crow's rich overview of American Gothic could serve as the basis for a PhD exam list. Likewise, Maisha Wester's wonderful chapter demonstrates the impact of the Haitian Revolution on depictions of race in the Gothic.

Readers familiar with British and American Gothic will find the cluster of essays addressing non-English Gothic unexpected and innovative. Taken as a whole, these four essays - on Spanish, Italian, Scottish, and Irish Gothic, respectively - suggest new directions in marginalised areas of Gothic studies. At the same time, though, they make a volume that is already heavily focused on British Gothic feel even more Eurocentric. Andrew Smith's concluding essay on the imperial Gothic offsets this to some extent, arguing that empire 'is not a unified concept' (463) in the late Victorian period. He considers the subtleties relating to Ireland near the end of the chapter, but the bulk of the chapter focusses on H. Rider Haggard's Egypt and Rudyard Kipling's India, making connections to global Gothic - something that the series' third volume explores more fully.

The Cambridge History of the Gothic: Volume II adds depth and complexity to the field of Gothic studies. Should Cambridge release an affordable paperback edition, many of these chapters would prove invaluable additions to entry-level and advanced Gothic/monster studies courses.

Nowell Marshall, University of Wisconsin-Madison