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? What did the term "Gothic" mean, when Horace Walpole used it in the subtitle of his experimental novel "The Castle of Ontranto"? How did a type of writing which broke all the rules of literary composition current at the time, gradually gain critical acceptance? What connections can be made between the aesthetic of terror and the terror of the French Revolution? What happened to Gothic after the decline of its popularity, during a period of political reaction? These are questions which "Gothic Documents" seeks to enable the reader to explore, by bringing together a wide range of contextual material.