Marie Mulvey-Roberts, ed. The Handbook to Gothic Literature. Houndmills, Macmillan, 1998. ISBN: 0-333-67069-8 (paperback). Price: £12.

As the editor of The Handbook to Gothic Literature suggests, handbooks are often seen as rather comforting things, even if the comfort they offer is ultimately deceptive. The 'impulse to catalogue and classify in the spirit of Augustan taxonomy', Mulvey-Roberts writes in her introduction, serves us with the illusion of gaining control over the otherwise uncontainable' (xv). Faced with the 'formless mass of Gothic space' (xv), surely anyone could be forgiven a desire for the semblance of such control. This Handbook in many ways admirably fills what has until now been a notable gap in Gothic studies. Sixty five contributors, many of whom are the leading scholars in their fields, have contributed what are frequently engaging, surprising, and provocative entries on a wide variety of subjects, and all, in their differing ways, contribute towards the discussion of two basic issues: what is Gothic and what is Gothic literature? The handbook allows the student to get both a sense of the big picture - there are, for example, concise and informative overviews for such entries as 'Gothic Novel' 'Scottish Gothic' and 'Female Gothic' - but also to find more detailed information about many of the authors or terms mentioned in the overviews by looking up the more specific entries. It is always difficult to decide the level at which to pitch such a handbook, and, particularly when the entries are being written by a wide and varied group of contributors, to impose any consistency is problematic, and probably not desirable. The editor suggests the Handbook 'purports to be introductory, referential and innovatory' (xvi-xvii), and my overall impression was that the Handbook would indeed be most useful for those students just beginning to engage with Gothic literature. There is, however, quite a variation in the level of complexity and detail found in the entries. While some discussions of 'minor' writers offer no more information than one might find in any competent guide to English literature, the majority of the key Gothic writers are treated in some detail, and the entries on such authors as Ann Radcliffe and Edgar Allan Poe go far beyond any kind of quick summary to offer excellent and extensive treatments of the key issues in the works and to suggest a wide variety of possible critical approaches. Similarly, while a few of the entries on key terms seem a touch too basic, even for an introduction, the majority, after clearly setting out the main points, encourage further exploration of the terms by engaging with some relatively complex theoretical issues, and provide very useful examples of how these terms and theoretical issues can be talked about with reference to a selection of texts. The contributors for 'Horror' and 'Terror', to name just two of many clear yet quite challenging discussions, pack quite a startling amount of information into a relatively short space. Entries like these mean that more advanced students will also find the Handbook of interest. All the students in our taught postgraduate course in The Gothic Imagination at Stirling, for example, have a copy. They do, inevitably, seem to use it in a somewhat oppositional manner, frequently disagreeing with the contributors' assessments and explanations. Nevertheless, by engaging in this kind of dialogue with the contributors, they are effectively identifying and refining their own positions on the Gothic. One of the main strengths of this handbook, in fact, is the way is promotes such provocative dialogues, even between its contributors (read the entries on 'Horror' and 'Terror' for a good example of this). It is through close attention to this dialogue that, as the editor notes, a 'working …