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About the Author – Dale Townshend

Dale Townshend has written 86 articles on The Gothic Imagination.

Although my particular field of research is British Gothic writing (romances; chapbooks; drama; poetry) of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, I am also interested in manifestations of the Gothic mode well beyond this temporal and geographical limit. My other research interests lie in the general field of critical theory, but with a particular focus upon French poststructuralism (Roland Barthes; Michel Foucault; Jacques Lacan; Jacques Derrida; Julia Kristeva; Gilles Deleuze; Felix Guattari) and its legacies in more contemporary European theorists such as Slavoj Zizek and Giorgio Agamben. Some recent publications include four volumes, co-edited with Fred Botting, in the Gothic: Critical Concepts in Literary and Cultural Studies series (London: Routledge, 2004); a monograph The Orders of Gothic: Foucault, Lacan, and the Subject of Gothic Writing,1764–1820 (New York: AMS, 2007); “The Haunted Nursery, 1764-1830,” an essay on the Gothic in children’s literature of the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth centuries published in The Gothic in Children’s Literature: Haunting the Borders, edited by Anna Jackson, Karen Coats and Roderick McGillis (New York: Routledge, 2007); and a scholarly edition of Mary Anne Radcliffe’s 1809 Gothic romance Manfroné: Or, The One-Handed Monk (Chicago: Valancourt Books, 2007). Forthcoming publications include Gothic Shakespeares, a collection of critical essays co-edited with John Drakakis (Routledge, 2008) and a chapter entitled “‘Love in a Convent’: Or, Gothic and the Perverse Father of Queer Enjoyment” in Queering the Gothic, edited by William Hughes and Andrew Smith (Manchester University Press, 2008).