The Supernatural and English Fiction

From Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto to Peter Ackroyd's Hawksmoor, the supernatural has been a recurring theme in English fiction. This book is the first ever to describe and discuss all the principal English writers who have handled the subject, including Ann Radcliffe, M. R. James, Rudyard Kipling, John Cowper Powys, James Hogg, Henry James, William Golding, Iris Murdoch, and Muriel Spark.

Cavaliero not only analyzes the senses in which the supernatural may be understood, but also relates them to different kinds of fiction, such as the Gothic novel, the occultist romance, the ghost story, novels of paranormal psychology, nature mysticism, and late twentieth-century allegory and fable.