In the 1790s, while across the Channel a political revolution raged, Britain was struck by a reading revolution, a taste for terror fiction that seemed to know no bounds. Ann Radcliffe and "Monk" Lewis were only the most celebrated of a host of writers purveying a new brand of "Gothic" literature. How is it that the age of Enlightenment gave rise to the genre of the literary ghost story? This is a landmark in the study of Gothic writing: nowhere else is the historical location of Gothic more richly or vividly illustrated.
