• Fin-de-siècle gothic is a major area of academic study. This book seeks to extend the fin-de-siècle gothic canon by making a sustained case for the significance of Richard Marsh as an important agent operating within this field.
• The first book-length study of Richard Marsh, the book examines a broad range of Marsh’s gothic fiction. Most existing essays on Marsh focus on his bestselling 1897 novel The Beetle. The range of this book is much broader, and many of the texts explored here have never been written about before. The chapters cover Marsh’s urban gothic, modernist gothic, domestic gothic and short ghost fiction.
• Most readings of Marsh’s work (mainly The Beetle) explore the author’s responses to questions of race, gender and sexuality. This book, while acknowledging Marsh’s undoubted interest in non-normative identities, reads Marsh’s gothic fictions through spatial theory, offering an alternative approach to his work.
• The book argues that genre acts as a map that orientates the reader to the fictional world of the text. Spatial theory has not been applied extensively to studies of the gothic mode, and the book thus offers an up-to-date and alternative critical reading of the gothic mode.