There are many ways of writing ethnographies. In his book ‘Tales of the Field’ (1988), John Van Maanen depicts the most common ways that he calls tales: realist, confessional, and impressionist. The classical form of ethnographic writing takes the shape of realist tales, dispassionate third-person narratives.

Postmillennial horror authors — Michael Wehunt, Laird Barron (2014) or Brian Evenson (2016a, b) treat this concern through what I call a dissociative writing. This, I feel is again a silent homage to Lovecraft, as Graham Harman (2012), analysing the object-oriented philosophy in Lovecraft’s literature, notices the “de-literalising gesture” as his major stylistic trait.

Ellen Moers’s initial generative suggestion galvanised a whole body of criticism that explores the coded expressions in women-authored Gothic texts, such as Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s ‘Madwoman in the Attic’ (1979), a volume of essays edited by Julian Fleenor entitled ‘The Female Gothic’ (1983), Kate Ferguson Ellis’s ‘The Contested Castle’ (1989), Eugenia DeLamotte’s ‘Perils of the Night’ (1990), Diane Long Hoeveler’s ‘Gothic Feminism’ (1998), Helene Meyers’s ‘Femicidal Fears’ (2001), Donna Heiland’s ‘Gothic and Gender’ (2004), Andrew Smith’s and Diana Wallace’s collection ‘The Female Gothic: New Directions’ (2009), and Avril Horner’s and Sue Zlosnik’s recent ‘Edinburgh Companion on Women and the Gothic’ (2016) among other monographs and essays too numerous to name.

At the time the Gothic novel grew popular, it also became common practice to furnish its publications with images. Not only because of the technical developments in the field of the letterpress, but also due to an increasingly literate public and a growing competitive market that provided the audience with reading matter, frontispieces and illustrations which were now an aspect of marketing.

Perhaps the most celebrated recent intervention into the field of history, gender, and the Gothic is Joan Copjec’s ‘Read My Desire’ (2015), especially the chapter ‘Vampires, Breast-Feeding, and Anxiety’. Copjec writes this work within a Lacanian tradition enacted by, amongst others, Frederic Jameson (Jameson 1977), Miran Bozovic (Bozovic 2000), and, most famously, Slavoj Žižek (Žižek 1997).

The vampire Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu inherited was not the folk figure that Coleridge might have known. By the time Le Fanu had begun work on Carmilla, the vampire had become recognised by the literary world.

As one of the most popular and recognisable monsters in European and American media, vampires have a unique cultural significance. In Our Vampires, Ourselves, Nina Auerbach argues that vampires are especially compelling because of their versatility, which allows them to “shape themselves to personal and national moods”; because of this adaptability, she says, their “appeal is dramatically generational” (5).

The American gothic powerfully influenced Ray Bradbury’s writing, and a midwestern carnival inspired him to become a writer. When Bradbury was a boy, his aunt Neva gave him a copy of Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘Tales of Mystery and Imagination’, illustrated by Harry Clarke.