Tales of Terror from "Blackwood's Magazine" (World's Classics) - Softcover

The tales of terror and hysteria published in the heyday (1817-32) of Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine became a literary legend in the nineteenth century. Blackwood's was the most important and influential literary-political journal of its time, and a major institution not just in Scottish letters but in the development of British and American Romanticism. Intemperate in political polemic and feared for its literary assassinations, the magazine became just as notorious for the shocking power of its fictional offerings. These set a new standard of concentrated dread and precisely calculated alarm, and were to establish themselves as a landmark in the development of the short magazine story. The influence of Blackwood's quickly reached many major authors, including Dickens, Emily Bronte, Robert Browning, and Edgar Allan Poe. This edition selects some of the best and most representative tales from the magazine's first fifteen years, including work by Walter Scott, James Hogg, and John Galt, alongside talented but now almost forgotten figures like William Mudford, William Godwin (son of the philosopher), and Samuel Warren. This book is intended for students of Romantic literature, Gothic, Sensational writing, of the nineteenth century.

Robert Morrison is Assistant Professor at the Department of English, Acadia University, Nova Scotia. Chris Baldick is Professor of English at Goldsmith's College, London. He is the editor of The Oxford Book of Gothic Tales, Trent's Last Case (Oxford Popular Fiction), and the author of The Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms.